Life fictions: Radicalization of life-writing in Leslie Scalapino’s "Zither & Autobiography" and "Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography & Fiction"
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Date
2015
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The paper discusses radicalized aesthetics and politics of structure and form in the experimental
autobiographical writing of American avant-garde author Leslie Scalapino. Associated with the
innovative protocols of the “Language School” poetry movement, Scalapino’s oeuvre emerges as
simultaneously a poststructuralist and phenomenologically oriented poetics in which writing performs
a thoroughgoing scrutiny of how one’s implication in linguistic and cultural matrices determines
one’s being in the world. Scalapino’s Autobiography, framed by Paul de Man’s remarks on
autobiographical writing as always controlled by the external expectations of self-fashioning, sets
out to examine and deconstruct the autobiographical project as in itself constructive of one’s life.
In Zither the poet complicates her take on life-writing by interrogating and reconceptualizing hidden
mechanisms of the genre and confronting it with its own fictional status, while in Dahlia’s iris
Scalapino juxtaposes detective fiction with a Tibetan form of written “secret autobiography”, based
on a radical departure from the chronology of one’s biography toward a phenomenological horizon
of what she refers to as “one’s life seeing”, a practice of attempting to see one’s mind’s constructions
as they are formed by the outside as well as by one’s internalization of the outside.
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Keywords
Language School, Leslie Scalapino, autobiography, avant-garde writing, Paul de Man, life writing
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 50.2-3 (2015), pp. 127-140
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0081-6272