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Article: Self-consciousness: Memoirs.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- July 10, 1989
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1989 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It's no use accusing the autobiographer rapher of egoism; that, after all, is the whole point. Autobiography starts from the conviction that bits of one's life are so significant that the uncomplicated, remorseless habit of self-referentiality will prove as gripping to the audience out there as it so unfailingly does to the author in here.
Obviously, monstrous egoism won't do by itself, although some egos are so distendedly and fascinatingly monstrous - Rousseau's or Frank Harris's or Francis Kilvert's - that we are hypnotized. By a different token, some life stories, like the huge, uncollected canon of working-class autobiographies of the nineteenth century ...