 Hello, welcome back. We are on the series of lectures which is being enacted by NPTEL National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning funded by the Ministry of Human Resource and a joint venture of Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science. We are on the module of Literary Genres and this is a part of the module of the lecture series of English Language and Literature. I teach English Literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITG, Guwahati and it has been all throughout an invigorating experience teaching literature to engineering students. I do believe that this lecture series which really open up the appreciation of literature as such and not only that, that literature and language are correlated with systems and structures and a different understanding of a chronology of systems. We are in the last part of this module of Literary Genres and today I would like to concentrate on autobiography which is one of the most personal branches of literature. Before we proceed with the lecture, I would like to recap do I recap that in our last lecture we had talked about biography as a form of life narrative. Autobiography is also a form of life narrative, but it is more personalized because in biography we had done that it was the narration of a life history by another person. So, the question of the other was very important here and the question of object and subject became marginalized. But here in autobiography we find that it is where the object and the subject becomes almost the same thing. In our last lecture we had also talked about the techniques of selection and omission and its focus on character, society and history relying on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints. This was what biography was about and let us see what autobiography has to say about its own genre and does it fit into a genre of fiction or poetry or drama or does it have its own niche by itself. So, as the most personal branch of literature when we say personal, when we speak of personal then we see that the question of self identity and so many psychological and philosophical issues come into here. And it also opens up to us a complex set of interpretive problems how we interpret the text written because mostly this written in the first person singular I which is both subject and object of the narrative. When we ask where does autobiography reside? We cannot say that it is only in the textual form, it may be in a visual art form, it may be in a painting, it may be in diaries, testimonies, journals, letters, memoirs, poetry, even scientific papers they had said. Now, there are new variations that even scientific papers are autobiographical works and more recently especially in the personal web pages, chat rooms and emails. Now, does this shift of attention from bios to authors, is it a recent phenomena or is it something that was going on for some time? When we see an autobiography it is from the viewpoint of a subject the field of human creativity it takes in and the most important aspect is its emphasis on self, the meaning of self and its endless mystery self cannot be documented as such. So, here comes the question of do we invent the truth? Do we invent the self or not? Because there are nuances of the philosophical, psychological and literary and that is how why I believe autos or autobiographies have become so much I raise nowadays in English departments. Now, the shaping part of the imagination and fascination with a complex individual soul simply put if we really put it in this genre autobiography is a reckoning you are somehow putting it before the people how yourself is. Now, the significant fact again of this shift of attention is the authenticity of the signature. The signature of authority because it is authentic you are writing your own life and because one is writing one's own life there is the responsibility of authenticity and authority and which the other genres do not have that which is conferred by the fact of being based on a verifiable relationship or an experience between the text and the extra textual reference. Well, so the true autobiography let us see does it tell us not merely of remembered deeds and thoughts or is it both author and reader are spiritual experiment avoidage of discovery. Now, Roy Buskell has been in this line as a critic of autobiography for a long time and we will be discussing his idea of autobiography through the lecture and he tells us that do you think that autobiography is just of remembered deeds what has happened near you or in your childhood and thoughts, but is for both author and reader it becomes almost an act of exorcism an act of spiritual experiment it is a voyage of discovery where the narrator also discovers himself and vice versa the subject also discovers the author. According to Buckley he differs he thinks it is a retrospective glance at the life and personality of a person yes one in which the facts carry less importance than the veracity and the profundity of the experience. So, this come this idea relies upon the selection and omission of some of the of the experience as Marzlis says why why it has autobiography become so eminent now and it has really become very popular it is mostly something which is fired by the romantic imagination produced by romanticism that was where you dealt mostly with what a self is which offers us a portrayed from the point of view of the present of the formation of an individual past at the same time achieved through introspection and memory. So, the past is being modified by the present as well as your own thinking introspection as well as a very significant aspect of memory and in which the eye appears as an entirety in development. So, the redefinition of techniques of forms now we come to the to what the lecture is about this techniques of forms when we talk about it the aesthetic theories of visibility and performance we go back to the Greeks we go back to Aristotle we go back to Plato when they had brought in the techniques of form the initial example in especially in western literature about digesses which is about narration and mimesis which is imitation. So, this conflict the binary forms that have been contrasted in Plato's and Aristotle's time and we will try to engage this concepts in our lecture mimesis shows the beauty of nature rather than tells it is an imitation of nature and it shows. So, it is visible it is more performative while digesses however is the telling of the story by the narrator. So, the issues that we have to consider now is digesses to what extent could one which is narration right to what extent could one expect from a genre which proposed to report the life story of an individual right. So, is it narration or is it is it the digesses or is it mimesis just an imitation mimesis what is the borderline between mirroring the fact in personal writings and how does the author project reality in his work. So, how much of it is manipulated how much of it is what would you say is selected for the sake of portraying a self. So, the intention here is to open up the debate about the binaries of mimesis which is imitation and digesses which is narration and how this genre redefines representation of form because everything is a representation and when we look at this genre of autobiography of life narrative as a form of representation then we have to take into account that does the author narrate or does he perform in terms of history, in terms of structures, in terms of experiments, in terms of visual art and in terms of very important culture. In the lecture on biography you had already noted that the cultural indicators of a biography is as important as the political indicators. Here in autobiography we believe that there are many things which comes across and there are the things where we have to see it in a new form. This thus when we were talking about imitation as such it had been a problem all throughout in critical vocabulary for a long time after Aristotle. Even now in the 21st century we are not being able to get out of it. So, the systematic importance given to the term differ greatly from critic to critic. Now those objects in the universe that art imitates or life if you call it for the first there was tendency to replace Aristotle's action as the principal object of imitation. But when we tried to go into shifted to human character or thought or even inanimate things the shift was it was a paradigm shift of different form of represent. So, by making autobiography into a genre we are now trying to put autobiography into a genre and one who relives. So, we were talking about imitation to be a prominent item in the critical vocabulary for a long time after Aristotle where action was replaced by such elements as human character or thought or even inanimate. So, while we want to make autobiography into a genre one elevates it above the literary studies of mere reportage. It seems to belong to a simpler mode of referentiality of representation or an off diagnosis of narration. A formula therefore, let us see does it combine chronological narration. When we talk of chronology we will be talking of time to mimesis which is imitation plus psychological fascination with the self which is individualism a very romantic fascination may be with the very nuances of how self and identity is being put up into representation. Well, Philip Lejeune who was one of the pioneers in the autobiographical criticism says concludes that retrospective it is a retrospective prose narrative that a real person makes of his own exist when he emphasizes his individual life specially the history of his personality. And the rules as Elizabeth brush says that the autobiographer must be at the origin of the plot as well as the structure of the text and the information and the facts must have been be or have the possibility of being true. So, this is a question which is being asked by my students that how is it that I can write about a life narrative how do we know that it is the true or not I can make it up. So, this question of the signature being the autobiographical fact is a very important part of the life narrative. Now, the issues that we will deal with since the concept of this genre designates an aesthetic as well as a historical function what is that state now is not only the distant the shelters the author of autobiography from his experience, but the possible conversion of aesthetics and representation. So, how we do with where we do with the meaning of gauge the meaning of perspective the meaning of representation of form what criteria does the autobiographer use to select events in his personal life. So, this question of selecting events in his personal life and how much documentary accuracy does the reader expect from the autobiographer. What are the roles of rhetoric now the language the form and the manner authenticity and imagery in the personal writing autobiographically autobiographically oriented writers this is a quotation from Pike above the naïve level demonstrate a striking common characteristic what is that an obsessive preoccupation with the chronological aspect of time when you read any autobiography any life narrative you will naturally find that one goes back to childhood it is like a retrospective portrayal of what one is trying to show and this preoccupation seems so widespread and so acute that it suggests an essential connection with the question right why certain people feel compelled to write about their lives such a preoccupation with time has two aspects one is psychobiological within the individual and the other is why the autobiographical impulse in the writing of fictional narrative are deeply congenial is that both are concerned with the linearity of time it is not circular as such, but somewhere it comes into phases of development and that is where we find that the autobiographer sees his life as a somewhat coherent identity as if there is coherence and this is which will be refuted by modern autobiographers like Maya Angelou aligns which begins with his birth and runs up to the present writing when we look into the structure of autobiography as such because as we had done biography we had referred to not a fry in his anatomy of criticism he had said that there are three elements that subsequently guide a writer's progress one is mythos ethos and dionia or action character and theme action can be taken up as the case technique over here and in a single narrative therefore this elements form a sequence of context and it goes to and fro passing through alternate phases of dominance or dominance in the case of autobiography. Let us go back now to see what are the early the early practitioners of this genre now came back with we have to see made decisive inroads historically religious confession provided an early form of the account of once conduct on earth and therefore we can say that it started as confession and which was in intention religious and the first autobiography in western literature we can date it almost back to Augustine St Augustine's confession and it proved a brilliantly successful landmark as the first western autobiography. Then as diary keeping and spiritual journals became more common in protestant England the line between confessional and more freely expository writing blurred and when we really look into the term autobiography however we see that as the term autobiography it was first coined when the genre began to flourish in the late 18th century in Europe and not America. Let us go back to the early practitioners of this genre which made decisive inroads which is started as a religious sacred confession and in St Augustine's confessions we find that he proved a brilliantly successful landmark in the as the first western autobiography and the word autobiography however was first coined when the genre began to flourish in the late 18th century in Europe and not America with the birth of the with romanticism and its different different effects. Then as diary keeping and spiritual journals became more common in protestant England the line between confessional and more freely expository writing blurred. One of the most famous initiators of this form or of the genre we can go to Rousseau's confession in 1782 across that Atlantic Benjamin Franklin's autobiography 1784 Frederick Douglas first lived narrative which was written around that time and givens memory. We can trace the growth of autobiography also to the from the middle ages is mode of expression as a distinct history of the human mind and renewing of individuality even though it is more or less the preoccupation of the western sensibility. The origin of the genre goes back to post-Homeric Greece and works by Hesiod and Plato some of those which were not exactly autobiographical but there were the record of lives record of conduct over its autobiographical poems, Marcus Aurelis's meditations and Julius Caesar's commentaries. Well this was from Rousseau's confession where there was this great flourish of of rhetoric when he thought that he had begun on a work which is without precedent whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I proposed to said before my fellow mortals a man in all the truth of nature and this man shall be myself. I present myself whenever the last trumpet shall sound before the sovereign judge within this book in my hand and loudly proclaim does have I acted this way my thoughts such was I this was the flourish of rhetorical you know beginning of his autobiography. At the same time we find more stage more matter of fact Benjamin Franklin when he writes in his autobiography that I should have no objection to a reputation of the same life from its beginning only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first. The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down to writing. Well so coming from the 18th century when we look into the 19th century we saw that it was the gradual alignment of autobiography with the value accorded to authorship. We come to a variety of forms the most important was the prelude a poetic journey by William Wordsworth. Fair sea time had my soul and I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Walt Whitman's song of myself across the Atlantic deacons again we have later in David Copperfield his fiction John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Thomas Carlynes, Sartre Sartre's Frederick Niatz's Essie Humo, John Stuart Mill's autobiography, Diaries of John Eveline Samuel Pepi's James Boswell and a huge lot of others. So we come to this position where we see the borderline between realism and the fictional, the meaning of whether autobiography is inventing the truth or the truth is being manipulated to suit the films of the author. Now, so the literature of the self if we see it has a long tradition in America because of the influence of the philosophical speculation of Emersonian eye declaring the primacy of subjective conscious and that was a 19th century theme and as we have just noticed that it was Walt Whitman's song of myself and Henry David Thoros Walden it was a eco almost a treatise on ecology nature and self. Coming closer home to the 20th century you find that Hemingway, Cerver Denders and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos they all work close to the vein of autobiography. We cannot say it is auto fiction yet we know that it was drawing on the material of their own lives. The history of American literature as a critic had said is more or less the history of private experience enacted on a public stage well. So, now we come to our 20th century. Now, as we see the phase that is going on the 20th century saw the genre move from the peripheries to the centre of the literary canon. It is here that it has taken on importance. We see different different types of life narratives which are being brought about. We have Adolf Hitler's main camp written in the beginning of the 20th century. Side by side with Mahatma Gandhi's and autobiography the story of my experiments with truth. We have Gertrude Sten's autobiography of Alice Bitochla's. We have very recent not very recently at the end of the 20th century Borhel Louis Borhel's Dream Tigers, Orhan Papuk's Istanbul, Maya Angelos I know why the case bird sings different forms. Yes this is significant when we come to the 20th century as such why so? Because this is the advance of the debt of the author. What is an author which was being brought about by birds and by Foucault? And when the author has been given ceremonial burial where is the role of autobiography as such as a genre? When we look into the post structuralist and post modernist theorization of the text as a purely textual object a self referential weave of codes then I think the entire genre of autobiography fails to deliver. When we come to Gertrude Sten's autobiography of Alice Bitochla's we find that it is where there is the paradigm shift from the self to the other and even in Sartre's autobiography written when he was already 60 years old relating only the first 12 years of the author's life. What I want to point out actually here is that while we are doing this text it is right for us to sensitize ourselves to the varying forms of this of this genre at the same time have the freedom to experience how this form has taken different variations in the name in the hands of the authors. Coming to Gandhi's autobiography the story of my experience with truth which has been regarded as one of the most simple expressions of truth and where he has taken life as a series of experiments where the connection with the public and the personal life has been projected in a manner which is connected with ethical values. It was a question of structure of how he had brought about into phases of life and where the self evolves in a metaphorical you can say as a sort of a pilgrimage towards the understanding of truth. That by side when we look into Gandhi's which was a simple narrative of honesty of pristine essentialism we find Hitler as a political autobiography if we can term Gandhi's autobiography as political and not so much as a moral autobiography we find that Hitler wrote his manifesto main camp and emerged less than a year later as a populist spokesman for economically depressed and nationalistic Germans. So, he used this form which he had written in prison and how he tried to indoctrinate the German mind and which was the advent of the Second World War. Coming to a very different form which was experimented by Borreluy Borges in an Argentine writer in his essay Borges and I this is a proverbial essay where he explores two selves the public and private. I will just quote one part of it here for your understanding this is from his essay Borges and I a very short fiction it is called the other one the one called Borges is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment perhaps mechanically now to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grill work of the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on the list of professors or on a biographical dictionary and this goes on the whole short essay at the end he concludes I do not know which of us has written this page. So, this paradox this ambiguity of the self of the public self and the self which is being projected in reality. We go to another text interesting text by Ohan Pamuk a Turkish author noble laureate in Istanbul we find this is a different text altogether it is an autobiography but here we find that it is the city which becomes the background of projection. He transformed the form of autobiography in Istanbul where he mingles personal memoir with cultural history. So, it is a in the light of the dialectics of cross cultural exchange it is wonderful actually the way he had experimented with this form. There are beautiful minute there are the beautiful portrayals of the city and of rooms in the city of the inner rooms and the outer space of the city and this is where he projects himself as a person. So, this is an autobiography which takes on a different form altogether where he does not write about his self as such he talks the city as a construct. He talks of Hozun which is a sort of a concept which is a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating which is a melancholy which pervades and which motivates the life of the people. Now, when we talk about this paradox of celebration in Ohan Pamuk will go into another critique of autobiography by Jacques Derrida who had said that when we write of oneself or when we write about the other the other becomes an interiorization of the self and therefore, he said that mourning for a person leads to the interiorization of the other on the self. So, that the other person besides within the within one's body and therefore, it is a different form of construct which takes in. Now, taking into consideration all these different forms that have been experimented on, let us see what formal features are shared by works like Augustine's Confessions, Wordsworth's Prelude, Thomas Carlisle Sartre Resartus, Henry Adams Education of Henry Adams and Thoreau's Weldon. Yet we will see that some autobiographies do appear under the guise of fiction nor by the fact that authors may design their works to be classifiable under both genres. This experiment text which go counter to the rigid norms of the genre where they have taken it as a form of fiction at the same time a form of documentation is one of the most well known writers of today Maya Angelou African American writer and in her autobiography the first in a series of autobiographies I know why the case bird sings show how it is possible to write autobiography using imagination as well as experience. Autobiography is thus hardly factual, unimaginative or even non-fictional for it welcomes all the devices of skilled narration and observes few of their restrictions of accuracy etcetera. Now, while going into Maya Angelou we will take it as an illustrative text. Let us see how she identifies it with that of self portraiture in painting from the visual arts. We shall examine now how it is equally a work of art and life where vision and memory remain the essential controls, time and space the central problems reduction and expansion the desired goals. It all also suggests a double entity the object as well as the subject the subject looking at the object as the subject and object looking at the subject as the object. So, it is a reciprocal transaction no longer distinctly separate the artist model must alternately pose and paint. So, he works from memory as well from everything else right. So, when we go into this text Maya Angelou's I know why the case birds sing I know that each one of you if you get the opportunity you should be able to read this book and when you go through half of it it has to be deemed into your mind that it is an autobiography that it is real it is not fictional the way the art of narration the ways we had developed it. So, this becomes equally a work of art and life this is this what would you call the forms of representation of mimesis as well as diagesis being brought together where vision and memory remain the essential controls, time and space the central problems, reduction and expansion the desired goals well to her she was almost challenged into writing this autobiography by Baldwin who told her that you are a poet I do not think you will be make be able to make your life as poetry and let us see whether you can take the challenge or not and she shut herself up and then we find that after two years she wrote the case bird and here it is her attempt to challenge the usual structure of autobiography by critiquing changing and expanding the genre. We had talked a few minutes back about the linear component of autobiography how it goes to phases of initiation experience or redemption or reconciliation this is absolutely being challenged by Angelo and she recognizes that our fictional aspects in a life narrative when she tends to diverse from the conventional notion of truth and focuses on figurative and language symbolic languages, voice, different points of view, flashbacks and other time sequences. So, it begins if you read it with the emulations of childhood yes, but then again the time goes on in a varying scale of flashback and again reality and it is episodic and crafted like vignettes it is like fragments and we will have to piece them together and delightful it is a record travel seamlessly back and forth in time. So, it is almost like it happens in real life it is not that everything happens in a linear position. So, it is fitting that Angelo should compare the poetic adventure to the act of painting everything is part of a large canvas I am creating I am living beneath what happens in a painting what happens in a visual art or in something which one depicts life. We find that there is hardly any closure you cannot put a full stop to your experience. So, we find that Angelo's autobiographical method from more conventional autobiographical forms is hard very denial of closure that it cannot stop because consciousness is evolving consciousness is somewhere being going on in a flux in a form of a river of different experience. So, let us now look at the issues and questions which we will deal with how much coherence and documentary accuracy could one expect from a genre which purports to report the life story of an individual right. So, do we expect coherence definitely yes and how much of documentary accuracy the documentary accuracy of course, is almost debatable in the sense that we can make it into alternate realities we can manipulate it into a different form of consciousness we can make it into a different form of authenticity. And what is the borderline between fact and fiction in autobiography to tell the truth the borderline is very thin because in reality when you have different aspects of consciousness working then we find that there are always this amalgam of the fictional with the real. And one of the main things which Lejeune had really insisted upon was the autobiographical pact when we know about this autobiographical pact when we know that the truth that is invented or reinvented has to have some basis on authenticity. And therefore, this pact is between the reader the text and the writer how does the author project reality in an autobiography what are the methods he takes in does it takes fictional forms does it take documentary forms does it take it from the form form form the constructs of history what is the criteria for selection and rearrangement of events in his personal life. So, rearrangement is a matter to be seen here which are the events that he likes to glorify or once to project which are the things which he deliberately forgets or deliberately omits and how much does the reader expect from an autobiographer traditionally now when we ask this questions at the same time we had talked about the history of the form yes, but let us see where autobiography has come to now we may say that everywhere we have a life narrative we have the chat rooms we have the Facebook we have all this emails where people are discovering themselves showing what they do every day even the smallest things like making a cake or going to a market is being put in Facebook do not we think that this are autobiographical discourse. The internet which has given many people unprecedented access to information is rivaling what has been the traditional privilege of print information and it is freely available and debates openly held in forums and comments threads of articles and there every opinion is being projected with the ease of access and publishing many forms of expression which we have seen exclusively in print entered the domain of the world wide web digital media has given a new dimension and existing forms of expression this is a very new form of expression. So, the autobiographical discourse that we are talking about has become almost digital there are blogs, blogs, podcast, forum, chat rooms, message boards what have you basically anything then that can be possibly written. So, the questions that we have dealt with whether autobiography is fiction or autobiography is fact is a matter of conjecture and we find that based on authenticity based on his own experience of his own life autobiographer a writer a scholar has the independence or the freedom to rearrange his life in such a way that it makes viable to the other to experience his life in that way. We have so many other autobiographies which have been written by scientists by entertain by people in entertainment by celebrity and we have found that they have become best sellers. It is not because people want to know the life of this people, but because of the way that it has been written and also the way that people want to experience the life that has been shown. The key source text in this lecture I have UCL Hobbs elements of autobiography, Maya Angelos I know why the case word sings, Roy Pascal design and truth in autobiography and Burton Pike's time in autobiography which talks more of western autobiography and the way that it has developed to the ages and some principles of autobiography of Howard and Paul Deman's autobiography as the face man. There are possibilities of seeing this life narrative as a different form altogether as a very invigorating strong form of narrative and we conclude with a poem by Jackie K which is a Nigerian Scottish writer poet and this poem is very very reflective of this domain of the life and this genre as such I always code this in class and the students really introspect and think about it all the time. So, for you I want to share it with you this poem short poem somebody else if I was not myself I would be somebody else, but actually I am somebody else I have been somebody else all my life it is no laughing matter going about the place and all the time being somebody else people mistake you mistake yourself thank you.