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Axe d’étude 2 : Mise en scène de soi

🎲 Quiz GRATUIT

📝 Mini-cours GRATUIT

Focusing on oneself

In her book Autobiography (2001), Linda Anderson defines an autobiography as "a public exposure of the private self". Written in the first person, an autobiography tells the story of the writer. In their book, The Voice Within (1973), R. Porter and H.R. Wolf underline that "Truth is a highly subjective matter and no autobiographer can represent exactly what happened back then". Many writers have written about their lives and autobiography has become a genre in itself.

Memoirs are usually written by politicians or historical figures, like Churchill's Memoirs of the Second World War (1996). Churchill was Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953 for his "mastery of historical and biographical description".

Diaries and journals also give readers an insight into writers' and artists' lives. In the foreword to Sylvia Plath's Journals (1982), the British poet Ted Hughes writes about his late wife "This is her autobiography, far from complete, but complex and accurate, where she strove to see herself honestly…"

Of course, autobiographies can be fictional too. They are written as if the fictional character was giving an account of his or her own life. Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë was originally published as Jane Eyre, an Autobiography.

Most painters have also immortalised themselves in self-portraits. For six weeks in the autumn of 1983, British painter David Hockney made a series of self-portraits. Art historian Marco Livingstone says "What I value above all in these drawings is Hockney's … readiness to depict himself with … honesty and … forthrightness…". Among American painter Edward Hopper's self-portraits the one he did in 1925-30 is undoubtedly the most famous one : dressed in a suit and tie with a hat on, he looks more like an office worker than an artist.

Quotations

"As of today, I have decided to keep a diary again – just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions … Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen." (Letters Home, Sylvia Plath, 1975)

"Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you overdramatize it or underplay it…" (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"In order to write my story, I had to enchant myself back to the time of being there." (Maya Angelou, about I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969)

"my greatest affliction, which is perhaps the major theme of my writings, … (is) the affliction of loneliness…" Memoirs (1975) Tennessee Williams

"…telling the truth about oneself on paper is virtually impossible…" (Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography, Timothy Dow Adams, 1990)

"The moment when a man comes to paint himself … has in the nature of things a special significance" (Lawrence Gowing)

Vocabulary

  • to underline: souligner

  • to give an insight: donner un apercu

  • foreword: avant-propos

  • late: feu (décédée)

  • accurate: juste, précis

  • to give an account: faire un récit

  • to strive (strove, striven): s'efforcer

  • readiness: volonté

  • forthrightness: sans détours

  • undoubtedly: sans aucun doute

  • rapture: bonheur, extase

  • to overdramatize: exagérer  (l'importance de quelque chose)

  • to underplay: minimiser (l'importance de quelque chose)

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