https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Index ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 Knausgaard's My Struggle: the interplay of authority, structure, and style in autobiographical writing https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:35980 My Struggle series. A comparison of the stylistic features of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Confessions, Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, and Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One, illuminates the contradictory way in which key fictionalising aspects of style in autobiographical writing-the sense of immediacy, and the intertwining of honesty and spontaneity-can appear to bolster Philippe Lejeune's autobiographical pact in such a way as to potentially distort or overplay the writer's authority. The critical reception of My Struggle: Book One shows how reviewers are often complicit in reinforcing this distortion. This paper argues that Knausgaard deploys a neatly meshed range of strategies to counterbalance this potential effect of autobiographical writing, both through his modulating of style against the structural design of his book, and through the stance he adopts outside the work. The latter includes his deliberately ambiguous positioning of the book in terms of genre, and his deployment of a controversial title that both inflects the reading of the work and continues to generate considerable resonance in the discourse that surrounds it.]]> Wed 22 Jan 2020 12:55:08 AEDT ]]> Places to which we return: mapping out a fragmented memoir https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:10313 Wed 11 Apr 2018 12:13:41 AEST ]]> The dangerous ambiguity of being on foot: Reflections on the act of walking and negotiating the tension between pedestrian and car in the process of writing a novel https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:52906 Tue 31 Oct 2023 15:53:53 AEDT ]]> The memoirist against history: Nabokov's speak, memory as the (re)negotiation of a literary form at the intersection of personal experience and historical narrative https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:44960 Speak, Memory is a literary memoir that negotiates the relationship between history and personal experience by illuminating one end of a spectrum of authoritative effects that range from artifice to spontaneity. In using play to leverage and highlight the tension between the artifice of a work of literature and the spontaneity of personal expression (or sense making on an individual level,) and by implicating both reader and writer within that tension, it demonstrates how literary memoir can negotiate its relationship to its genre. There are thus two forms of negotiation at work in Speak, Memory, the one between artifice and spontaneity, the other between individual experience and historical narrative. In this way, by using play to invite the reader into the interpretative act, Nabokov emphasises the role of artifice in the autobiographical project, and, by doing so, stakes out a claim for the literary autobiographical writer in the face of historical narrative.]]> Tue 25 Oct 2022 12:28:26 AEDT ]]> The last thread https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:16504 Sat 24 Mar 2018 08:04:18 AEDT ]]> Confession and third party revelation in memoir: the narrator, the confessant, and textual strategies for decentring the memoirist's authority https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:23798 Fierce Attachments, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and my own book, The Last Thread. My paper examines the use of both implicit and explicit self-reflexive confessional gestures regarding the ethical boundaries of the texts that memoirists have written and argues that, despite the transparency that such gestures appear to offer the reader, it is largely through the separation of the roles of narrator and confessant that occurs through third party revelation – and consequently the disruption of the prescribed roles of writer and reader as the deliverer and receiver of confession – that memoirists can effectively decentre their own authority.]]> Sat 24 Mar 2018 07:13:19 AEDT ]]> The struggle in Karl Ove Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:49235 Mon 08 May 2023 10:00:46 AEST ]]> Swarte Piet https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:31676 Fri 27 Sep 2024 08:57:49 AEST ]]> The Restorer https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/ /manager/Repository/uon:53565 Fri 08 Dec 2023 15:32:44 AEDT ]]>