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Abstract

This study discusses the various and limitless potentials of representing the self. Poststructuralist approaches to the study of culture have problematized the opposition of fiction and nonfiction by emphasizing the literariness of those modes of writing that pretend to offer unmediated access to reality, that is, to present their subjects “in all the totality, there-ness, and authenticity of their being”. The seeds for that deconstructive move were sewn within literary studies by Roland Barthes, who argued that realist fiction did not present reality as it is but rather employed a variety of devices to create “l’effet de réel” (Barthes 1968). This critique was expanded beyond the confines of literary studies to include the writing of history, with Hayden White arguing that history writing shares many characteristics of literary writing, in particular a reliance on narrative to produce meaning, and so should be read as such. This, naturally, had implications for the genres of biography and autobiography, now often referred to as “life writing” and studied as “an art form” (Lee 2009: xiii) or, in James Olney’s formulation, “the way experience is transformed into literature” or life is “translated” into writing. This focus on the literariness of life writing has brought the biographer out from the shadows, so to speak, producing a subgenre of literary biographies, that is, biographies written not by “objective” historians but by “interested” writers, such as Edmund White’s biography of Proust (1999) or Jane Smiley’s biography of Charles Dickens (2002) in the book series Lives. The new focus on the biographer as writer parallels in interesting ways the re-conceptualization of the translator as writer in translation studies. Brian James Barr attributes the importance the translators’ biographies acquires recently to the translators’ portraits. In his study, he describes a society in which the translators obtains the right to writing biography or autobiography, i.e, the possibility of narrating their lives and works in narrations that do not easily belong to the non-fictional.

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