Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections

About the Book

Self-Same Songs constitutes a major contribution to the growing literary study of autobiography. Using a range of authors, including Homer, Edward Gibbon, Benjamin Franklin, Somerset Maugham, Franz Kafka, and Eugene Delacroix, Roger J. Porter offers a broad-based examination of the autobiography and the varied techniques used by its practitioners over time. In a style that is both graceful and erudite, Porter focuses on the diverse motivations and rhetorical functions that the act of self-writing serves for particular writers. He reflects on the texts not only as an exploration of self-identity but also as the writers' attempts to modify the life in the act of writing about it. Then, stepping out of his critical role, Porter ends each chapter with an autobiographical discussion of his professional and personal engagement with the autobiographer under discussion, creating an intriguing and absorbing literary autobiography within the critical text. Roger J. Porter is a professor of English and humanities at Reed College. He is a co-author of A Food Lover's Companion to Portland.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments; IntroductionAutobiography and Exile1. The Singer in the Song: Autobiography in The Odyssey2. The Pleasures of Nostos: Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, MemoryAutobiography as Defense3. Filling Up the Silent Vacancy: Edward Gibbon's Autobiography4. Unspeakable Practices, Writable Acts: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography5. The Sorrows of Autobiography: Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up6. Redemptive Evasions: Edwin Muir's The Story and the FableAutobiography as Self-Effacement7. Autobiographical Writing as Death Weapon: Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence and Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father8. Figuration and Disfigurement: Herculine Barbin's Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite9. Annulled Selves: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's An Accidental Autobiography and Michel Leiris's Biffures Autobiographical Posturing10. Romantic Posing: The Life and Death Writing of Benjamin Robert Haydon11. "A Serpent in the Coils of a Pythoness": Self-Dramatization in Eugene Delacroix's JournalSelf as Other, the Other as Self12. Conflict and Incorporation: Edmund Gosse's Father and Son13. My Mother and Myself: Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh14. Self and Other Is One Flesh: Double Voicing in Nathalie Sarraute's Childhood, Ronald Fraser's In Search of a Past, and Howard and Arthur Waskow's Becoming BrothersEpilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index

About the Author :
Roger J. Porter is a professor of English at Reed College and one of the pioneering scholars in the literary study of autobiography. He is the coauthor (with Howard Wolf) of The Voice Within: Reading and Writing Autobiography and the coauthor (with Lisa Shara Hall) of A Food Lover's Companion to Portland.

Review :
"Self-Same Songs offers engaging, subtle, accessible, and insightful readings of an eclectic range of autobiographical texts. And Roger Porter's lively interweaving of personal narrative with each chapter extends critical inquiry into a dialogic conversation that is provocative for the reader's own self-reflection." - Julia Watson, co-author of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives "Roger Porter both shows and tells us much about the act of autobiography in his excellent Self-Same Songs. Illuminating studies of the performances are wonderfully balanced and sharpened by reflections on Porter's own rich, diverse, and always astonishing life. A critical and imaginative triumph." - James Olney, author of Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing "Roger Porter reads and writes autobiography with subtlety and passion. These adventurous essays offer a splendid introduction to the riches of the form." - John Eakin, author of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves