As most secondary literature on the autobiography confuses the relationship between author, narrator, and hero/heroine, this study begins by analyzing this problem. Ivan Bunin's The Life of Arsen'ev can be best characterized as «autobiography as the creation of fiction, told exclusively from a grown-up perspective». Special attention is paid to the relationship between the childlike-hero, grown-up hero/heroine, and the narrator, to the extent that the fictional narrative is based on primary material from Bunin's life.

Índice abreviado: 1. Text: words and other signs 2. Story: aspects 3. Fabula: elements. Afterword: theses on the use of narratology for cultural analysis.

This study presents a contextualized narratology of African American autobiography. The author compares eight autobiographies by seven African American writers from different periods (namely, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks) and focuses on both the issue of race and such formal elements as temporal arrangement, narrative situation, narrative perspective, present tense, commentary, unreliability as well as audience. In addition to proposing a major framework for the narratology of autobiography in the opening chapter, the succeeding practical analyses draw on other approaches, such as stylistics and rhetoric, which complement narratology in the investigation of «how» a story is presented.

Provides extensions and reconceptions of unnatural narratology, and intervenes in major debates in narratology, critical theory, and narrative analysis.

projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.

Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, "Narrative," argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, "Life Writing: Historical Forms," makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, "Autobiography Now," identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.