Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing: Narrating the Male Self

209 Pages·2023·9.03 MB·English

by  Christina Schönberger-Stepien

Contemporary Second- and Third-Person
Autobiographical Writing
This book explores 21st-century uses of the second-and third-person perspective
in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through
detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster,
Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the
multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narra-
tive perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a
perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and auto-
biography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of sub-
jectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting
from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between
autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant
guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in
relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics,
and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural
context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives
reflect the authors’ position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as
well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and
celebrity status.
Christina Schönberger-Stepien is Lecturer in English Literature at the University
of Augsburg in Germany. Her research areas include life-writing, Victorian lit-
erature and culture, and working-class literature. She has published essays on
autobiographical writing, on the feminist biopic, and on contemporary working-
class anthologies.
Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Series Editor: Ricia A Chansky
Trans Narratives
trans, transmedia, transnational
Edited by Ana Horvat, Orly Lael Netzer, Sarah McRae and Julie Rak
Speculative Biography
Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations
Edited by Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey
Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging
Nicole Stamant
Engaging Donna Haraway
Lives in the Natureculture Web
Edited by Cynthia Huff and Margaretta Jolly
Afropean Female Selves
Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego
Christopher Hogarth
Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back
Symptoms of Sincerity
Charles Reeve
Towards a Theory of Life-Writing
Genre Blending
Marija Krsteva
Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing
Narrating the Male Self
Christina Schönberger-Stepien
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Auto-Biography-Studies/book-series/AUTO
Contemporary Second- and
Third-Person Autobiographical
Writing
Narrating the Male Self
Christina Schönberger-Stepien
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Christina Schönberger-Stepien
The right of Christina Schönberger-Stepien to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
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explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-38504-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-38505-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34537-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374
Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Towards a Poetics of Second- and Third-Person
Autobiographical Writing 1
2 Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal 46
3 Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior 75
4 Personal and Exemplary Grief in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life 103
5 The Personal and the Ethical in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime 131
6 The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph
Anton 164
7 Perspectives and Conclusions 193
Index 198
Acknowledgements
I owe genuine thanks to many people who have contributed to this book
and who have enriched my (academic) life over the years. First and fore-
most, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Martin Middeke for his
critical eye on the project and his invaluable feedback throughout various
stages of my research. I am forever grateful for his unbroken interest in
my work, his unwavering motivational and intellectual support, and the
encouragement to embark on my doctoral journey. I also thank the late
Christoph Henke, who is dearly missed, for having been an incredible
mentor and teacher, and who supported my academic endeavours from
the very beginning. I want to thank Katja Sarkowsky for agreeing to co-
supervise my thesis and for her helpful feedback, especially during the final
stages. Thanks are also due to Mathias Mayer for agreeing to join the
examination board for my viva, which proved to be a delightful and
thought-provoking conversation on life-writing.
Special thanks go to my lovely colleagues at the University of Augsburg –
most of all to Martin Riedelsheimer, Eva Ries, Korbinian Stöckl, and Leila
Vaziri – for their steady support and insightful conversations.
I thank the editors and publishers of two edited collections for their permis-
sion to republish the following material: Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as “‘You’
Reconstructing the Past: Paul Auster’s Winter Journal” in the collection Auto/
Biography: Its Telescopic and Temporal Dimensions, edited by Beatrice Bar-
balato, published by Presses Universitaires de Louvain in 2017. Material from
Chapter 6 originally appeared as “Rushdie’s Rebellious Joseph Anton or:
Chronicling the Aftermath of The Satanic Verses” in the collection Aftermath:
The Fall and the Rise after the Event, edited by Robert Kusek et al. and
published by Jagiellonian University Press in 2019.
I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the generous insti-
tutional support and funding which enabled the completion of this project.
Thanks are due to the German Academic Scholarship Foundation for its
valuable financial and intellectual support through a doctoral scholarship.
My travels and research visits were generously funded by the Young
Researchers Travel Scholarship Programme and the Women’s Advancement
Programmes at the University of Augsburg. I would like to thank the Paul
Acknowledgements vii
Auster Society in Copenhagen for valuable inspiration in the earliest stages
of the project. Special thanks are due to the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing
for awarding me a Doctoral Studentship and an incredibly beneficial
research stay, and to the late Laura Marcus for her critical insights and
invaluable feedback on my project. I also thank all the brilliant colleagues
and scholars I have met at conferences, workshops, and trainings for excel-
lent discussions and generous advice.
To my wonderful friends: thank you for providing much-needed distractions
beyond the thesis and for your steady and loving support throughout the
decades of friendship. To my family: thank you for always believing in me
and loving me for everything I do. And finally, my most heartfelt thanks go
to my husband Vik, my love and best friend: thank you for everything.

1 Towards a Poetics of Second- and
Third-Person Autobiographical
Writing
Autobiography, life-writing, memoir: whichever term we use, we most likely
associate it with a first-person narrative, which has always been the more
common form of self-narration – so common that Paul J. Eakin called the
genre a “literature of the first person” (“What Are We Reading” 124). Phi-
lippe Lejeune, whose work on autobiography is foundational to the field of
life-writing, was quick to point out the existence and general “possibility” of
autobiographies in the second and third person (On Autobiography;
“Autobiography in the Third Person”). While autobiography has always
been a genre that both polarised and attracted a vast and diverse readership
(Schwalm, “Autobiography” 14), the critical engagement with life-writing in
the wake of a still ongoing “memoir boom” (Gilmore, The Limits of Auto-
biography 2) leads me to a variety of works which remove the “I” from the
central focus of their narrative. While the third person was long considered
the “standard” perspective in the novel and later challenged by the first-
person novel, life-writing seems to have developed in reverse order. I am
especially interested in the question of how the second and third person in
autobiographical writing impact the communicative situation, the role of
subjectivity and relationality, the private and public self. To what extent
does the use of the second and third person shape the self-portrayal and self-
stylisation of the autobiographer, for example by helping the author gain
some sort of “presence through absence” (with the absence of the subject
being a technique to renegotiate the presence of the very same)? And to what
extent does autobiography as the classical form of self-life-writing leave the
scope of the individual, personal, exclusive and move towards the relational and
public? This does not at all suggest that the status of a work as “auto-
biographical” depends on the personal pronoun or the narrative perspective
used. Neither does it mean that a relational notion of autobiographical writing
can only occur in second- and third-person texts. It means that the choice of
narrative perspective may, as I argue, impact the rhetorical effect(iveness) of the
work and the portrayal of the autobiographical self.
The literariness of autobiographical writing and the question of aesthetics
play a special role in the process of self-narration: “While literary auto-
biographers do not eschew exemplarity, they tend to privilege aesthetics; their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-1