Aesthetic Autobiography

Aesthetic Autobiography is a pathbreaking study in comparative literature which gets to the heart of what is literary at a time when the classic distinctions between literature and other forms of writing are under attack. Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography. Selectively reviewing both the history of autobiography proper and the critical studies to date, she positions her subject in a new area of aesthetics by demonstrating the transmutation of life fact into fiction in the modern autobiographical novel. Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century - Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, with Anais Nin in their wake - Nalbantian discerns models of a hybrid genre characterized by a common aesthetics. She discovers in these writings a threshold of artistic transformation beyond the identification of biographical authenticity. Juxtaposing the fiction of these novelists with the standard biographies of them, Nalbantian finds a heightened reference with respect to self, place, and object. She shows how these authors, who focus on their own experiences with unusual intensity, transform their authentic life material into the artificial by aesthetic detachment and distancing. Such artistic processes include the distortion of time and chronology, the dislocation of place, the splitting of the 'I' into multiple personae, the conflation of persons and places, substitution, the aggrandizement of characteristics, and the symbolization of obsession. The book sheds new light on the creative process of fictionalization.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.