Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience

Autobiography Gunn argues must be reunderstood as a cultural act of reading the self not as a private act of writing the self. Moreover the self that is read (both by the autobiographer and the reader of autobiography) is the displayed self not the hidden self―the self that appears in the world and can be experienced and thereby realized by others. Drawing on narrative theory phenomenology and hermeneutics Gunn locates the literary features of autobiography in the larger anthropological context of what she calls the autobiographical situation. An elegantly constructed interdisciplinary analysis this book renders the hybrid genre of autobiography freshly problematic.