From Library Journal
These studies of autobiographical writing approach the topic from different angles. Bjorklund, a social scientist, analyzes the genre from the perspectives of psychology, sociology, and ethnic studies. She has selected five representative titles from each decade starting from 1800 and examines them from in terms of how the concept of self has changed in U.S. history and society. She divides the book into four sections: religious autobiographies, the works of business or "self-made" individuals, the psychological aspects of life-writing, and ways in which society and the environment have molded lives. Bjorklund studies both famous and obscure writers, and her clear prose style and copious quotations provide insight into the many aspects of the changing American self. Olney is a professor of literature (Louisiana State Univ.) and is therefore more interested in how certain authors have made narrative out of memory. He focuses on three landmark autobiographers: St. Augustine, one of the first life-writers, who used his life to illustrate religious doctrines; Rousseau, who was only interested in how his own feelings and thoughts made an impact on society; and Samuel Beckett, who invested his novels and plays with his own, ultimately hopeless quest to understand his life story. Olney's analyses are complex, but his exhaustive readings of these three main authors illuminate their methods and struggles. Bjorklund's study is appropriate for undergraduate collections, while Olney's is geared for graduate studies.?Morris Hounion, NYC Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn, NYCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
In his monumental study of the European tradition of life-writing, Olney traces the dialectic of autobiography from the early Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism, focusing on St. Augustine, Rouseau, and Beckett and drawing on a range of personalities including Montaigne, Vico, Stein, Kafka, and Giacometti. As the first autobiographical writing in the West, St. Augustine's Confessions and Trinity established a long-lasting literary canon that would be challenged only 13 centuries later by Rousseau's trilogy: Confessions, Dialogues, and Reveries. While St. Augustine adopted past events as his subject matter, Rousseau tended to recount feelings about events rather than the events themselves. St. Augustine used the story of his long journey to God to present an exposition of Christian doctrine, while Rousseau intended to teach others self-knowledge by communicating his own vulnerabilities and emotions and inviting the reader to feel the same. In featuring himself as a model, Rousseau indulged in self-praise, transforming St. Augustine's confession into apologia. Another cardinal shift effected by Rousseau and passed along to latter-day writers was fragmentation of the ``I'' and skepsis about the adequacy of language for life-writing. A prominent inheritor of the autobiographical tradition, Beckett declared the whole enterprise impossible, based on a postmodern doubt of reason, cohesive narrative, and the unified voice. In Krapp's Last Tape, The Unnamable, and other works, Beckett wrote specifically on the life-writer's failure to account for the past in any objective way. Mixing the first and third person, Beckett's narrators reminisce about their prior acts of memory, incapable either of pinning down the original event or completing their narrative. Detached from reality and trapped in incessant self-referentiality, the memory of postmodern writers signs a death sentence to the genre of autobiography. Olney's study is full of insights. It is regrettable, however, that it takes great effort to cut through the author's dry academic style and convoluted syntax to reap the benefits of his solid research and excellent analysis. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Memory and Narrative presents an elegant, authoritative account of how life-writing has changed over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.






From the Inside Flap
Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding books in literary scholarship or criticism

Memory and Narrative presents an elegant, authoritative account of how life-writing has changed over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy and, as Olney explains, found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.



About the Author
James Olney is the Voorhies Professor of English and professor of French and Italian at Louisiana State University. He is author, editor, or coeditor of eleven books, most recently The Language(s) of Poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He is also coeditor of The Southern Review.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

At a time when the memoir has never been more popular, Memory and Narrative presents an account of how the weave of life-writing has altered over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound and disruptive changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found its momentary conclusion in the body of Samuel Beckett's work. Among other issues, Olney considers the rejection of the pronoun "I" by many post-Rousseau writers; the uses of narrative in the works of Beckett, Franz Kafka, and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and the role of literary memory in light of recent "memory work" from a variety of scientific disciplines. Giambattista Vico, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and Christa Wolf are some of the many writers examined in this monumental study.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jason Berry - Chicago Tribune

An elegant work of scholarship.... Olney's concerns about moral dimensions of memory and how life tales are written carry a timely resonance.

Booknews

A language and literature scholar traces the history of people writing about themselves, from the autobiographical efforts of St. Augustine, through the genre's profound and disruptive changes in the hands of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to the work of Samuel Beckett. He looks at such aspects as the rejection of the first-person singular pronoun by many post-Rousseau writers, autobiographical elements in Kafka and sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and the insight provided by recent memory work in a number of sciences. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Kirkus Reviews

In his monumental study of the European tradition of life-writing, Olney traces the dialectic of autobiography from the early Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism, focusing on St. Augustine, Rouseau, and Beckett and drawing on a range of personalities including Montaigne, Vico, Stein, Kafka, and Giacometti. As the first autobiographical writing in the West, St. Augustine's Confessions and Trinity established a long-lasting literary canon that would be challenged only 13 centuries later by Rousseau's trilogy: Confessions, Dialogues, and Reveries. While St. Augustine adopted past events as his subject matter, Rousseau tended to recount feelings about events rather than the events themselves. St. Augustine used the story of his long journey to God to present an exposition of Christian doctrine, while Rousseau intended to teach others self-knowledge by communicating his own vulnerabilities and emotions and inviting the reader to feel the same. In featuring himself as a model, Rousseau indulged in self-praise, transforming St. Augustine's confession into apologia. Another cardinal shift effected by Rousseau and passed along to latter-day writers was fragmentation of the "I" and skepsis about the adequacy of language for life-writing. A prominent inheritor of the autobiographical tradition, Beckett declared the whole enterprise impossible, based on a postmodern doubt of reason, cohesive narrative, and the unified voice. In Krapp's Last Tape, The Unnamable, and other works, Beckett wrote specifically on the life-writer's failure to account for the past in any objective way. Mixing the first and third person, Beckett's narrators reminisce about their prior acts of memory,incapable either of pinning down the original event or completing their narrative. Detached from reality and trapped in incessant self-referentiality, the memory of postmodern writers signs a death sentence to the genre of autobiography. Olney's study is full of insights. It is regrettable, however, that it takes great effort to cut through the author's dry academic style and convoluted syntax to reap the benefits of his solid research and excellent analysis. .

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

This ambitious and gracefully written account, like life-writing itself, is exploratory, speaking to us of a journey that has not yet reached its end. I am grateful for all that I have gained from accompanying this knowledgeable guide down some fascinating byways. — James McConkey