Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin

by Suzanne Nalbantian

'A rich contribution to the study of autobiography.' - James Olney Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography. Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century - Proust, Joyce, Woolf, with Nin in their wake - Nalbantian discerns models of a hybrid genre characterised by a common aesthetics. She discovers in these writings a threshold of artistic transformation beyond the identification of biographical authenticity.

235 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Long Island University and an interdisciplinary scholar in the humanities and neuroscience. She holds the BA from Barnard College (’71) and the PhD from Columbia University (’75), and she is a permanent member of Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. At LIU, she has been the winner of the TASA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement and the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Nalbantian is the author of four scholarly books and two edited volumes. She is the principal editor of The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (MIT Press 2010). Her pioneering book Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (Palgrave 2003) forged new pathways linking literary memory studies to neuroscience. She has lectured nationally and internationally on the interdisciplinary study of memory and has directed several conferences on that topic. Since 2012, she has been the Chair of the International Comparative Literature Association Research Committee on Literature and Neuroscience.

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to study autobiography as a literary genre, but this is more about gnere mixing, novels with strong autobiographical elements, which is also cool, but not quite what I was after...

[Maher Battuti · Rating 4 out of 5]

تحليل عميق للكاتبة يمزج بين حياة هؤلاء الروائيين الكبار وبين الكتب التى أصدروها ، وهم جويس وبروست وفرجينيا وولف وأناييس نن