Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing

by James Olney

Overview

Memory and Narrative presents an elegant, authoritative account of how life-writing has changed over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

"This is an elegant work of scholarship." —Jason Berry, Chicago Tribune

"Examines how the fascinating, reciprocal relationship between memory and narrative has evolved over the course of 17 centuries. . . . Olney's work is a valuable companion to his subjects' primary texts." —Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226628165
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/15/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	446
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

James Olney is the Voorhies Professor of English and professor of French and Italian at Louisiana State University. He is author, editor, or coeditor of eleven books, most recently The Language(s) of Poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He is also coeditor of The Southern Review.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prelude
1. Memory and the Narrative Imperative
First Interlude
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Crisis of Narrative Memory
Second Interlude
3. Not I
4. Narrative
5. Memory
Postlude
Index

What People are Saying About This

James McConkey

This ambitious and gracefully written account, like life-writing itself, is exploratory, speaking to us of a journey that has not yet reached its end. I am grateful for all that I have gained from accompanying this knowledgeable guide down some fascinating byways.

Brian Stock

This valuable study brings together Olney's views on a wide variety of authors from St. Augustine to the twentieth century. In its range and depth, this is the most important study of memory and personal narrative in recent decades.

Editorial Reviews

An elegant work of scholarship.... Olney's concerns about moral dimensions of memory and how life tales are written carry a timely resonance.
— Chicago Tribune

Jason Berry

A language and literature scholar traces the history of people writing about themselves, from the autobiographical efforts of St. Augustine, through the genre's profound and disruptive changes in the hands of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to the work of Samuel Beckett. He looks at such aspects as the rejection of the first-person singular pronoun by many post-Rousseau writers, autobiographical elements in Kafka and sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and the insight provided by recent memory work in a number of sciences. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

In his monumental study of the European tradition of life-writing, Olney traces the dialectic of autobiography from the early Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism, focusing on St. Augustine, Rouseau, and Beckett and drawing on a range of personalities including Montaigne, Vico, Stein, Kafka, and Giacometti. As the first autobiographical writing in the West, St. Augustine's Confessions and Trinity established a long-lasting literary canon that would be challenged only 13 centuries later by Rousseau's trilogy: Confessions, Dialogues, and Reveries. While St. Augustine adopted past events as his subject matter, Rousseau tended to recount feelings about events rather than the events themselves. St. Augustine used the story of his long journey to God to present an exposition of Christian doctrine, while Rousseau intended to teach others self-knowledge by communicating his own vulnerabilities and emotions and inviting the reader to feel the same. In featuring himself as a model, Rousseau indulged in self-praise, transforming St. Augustine's confession into apologia. Another cardinal shift effected by Rousseau and passed along to latter-day writers was fragmentation of the "I" and skepsis about the adequacy of language for life-writing. A prominent inheritor of the autobiographical tradition, Beckett declared the whole enterprise impossible, based on a postmodern doubt of reason, cohesive narrative, and the unified voice. In Krapp's Last Tape, The Unnamable, and other works, Beckett wrote specifically on the life-writer's failure to account for the past in any objective way. Mixing the first and third person, Beckett's narrators reminisce about their prior acts of memory,incapable either of pinning down the original event or completing their narrative. Detached from reality and trapped in incessant self-referentiality, the memory of postmodern writers signs a death sentence to the genre of autobiography. Olney's study is full of insights. It is regrettable, however, that it takes great effort to cut through the author's dry academic style and convoluted syntax to reap the benefits of his solid research and excellent analysis. .

Kirkus Reviews