David McCooey

The limits of life writing

As my co-editor Maria Takolander writes elsewhere in this collection, ‘Life writing has long been theorised in terms of its limits’. Indeed, one might say that a concern with limits brought the field of life-writing studies into being. The rise of auto/biography studies (the forerunner of life-writing studies) in the 1970s and 80s was in large part a concern with the generic and disciplinary limits of what constituted both auto/biography and ‘Literature’. This was despite Paul de Man’s warning that attempts to define autobiography in terms of genre ‘seem to founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable’ (919). Philippe Lejeune sought to circumvent such definitional problems by attending to autobiography as a mode of reading, and (famously) understood the relationship between autobiographer and reader as a ‘pact’ (a formal agreement of limitations). Lejeune’s legal metaphor and structuralist approach, though, was far from reductive. His conclusion that autobiography is a ‘historically variable contractual effect’ (30) effectively draws attention to the limits of proposing limits. Looking back at these and other foundational works in life-writing studies, we see limits constantly coming into conceptual play: the limits between literary and factual writing; between narrative as a literary device and narrative as lived experience; and between autobiography and fiction. As titles such as Fictions of Autobiography, Being in the Text and Artful Histories suggest, earlier studies of autobiography habitually dealt with the limits of life writing with recourse to hybridity, if not oxymoron and paradox. And, of course, life writing as a practice, rather than a discipline, has also always been concerned with limits: the limits between self and other, memory and forgetting, past selves and present self, and so on. As Christopher Cowley writes, in Philosophy and Autobiography, Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), conventionally seen as a foundational autobiography, is (among other things) ‘a serious exploration of the limits of truthful self-representation’ (1–2). The shift in the last two decades from auto/biography studies to life-writing studies was notably informed by feminist and postcolonial theory, as well as the rise of cultural studies, as seen in the critical attention given to auto/biographical subjects previously silenced, such as women, people of colour, Indigenous peoples, and (more recently) children. Such lifewriting theory began from a critique of the human subject (simultaneously universalised and limited as male, European, self-present and autonomous), reconfiguring subjectivity as diverse, provisional and intersubjective. The life writing of such subjects was seen to deconstruct the supposedly secure limits of selfhood and auto/biographical expressions of selfhood. The move from auto/biography studies to life-writing studies has therefore involved expanding the object of study from putatively literary texts to life narratives as they might be most broadly understood: testimony; autoethnography; digital life writing; and so on. This move has allowed for the consideration of graphic, audio-visual and transmedial forms. These include graphic memoir (or comics more generally), photography, auto/biographical film and video and social media. Indeed, far from being generically ‘impossible’, as de Man would have it, the generic limits of life narrative have been simply, and constantly, expanding, as seen in the list of life-writing genres in Sidonie Smith’s and Julia Watson’s influential Reading Autobiography. The 52 genres listed in the 2001 edition rose to 60 in the 2010

Autobiography in Australian Parliamentary First Speeches

This article analyzes the autobiographical content in the First Speeches of three Australian parliaments (1950, 1976, and 1996). It argues that such autobiographical disclosure has significant political functions—in particular, representing credentials, and representing social and political affiliations. The essay argues that these functions highlight, and finesse, the paradoxical condition that parliamentarians find themselves in, of having to simultaneously represent themselves and their constituencies.