The Serial Mythology of a Non-Representative Self: Rebecca Brown’s Life Writing

Authors

  • Lies Xhonneux University of Antwerp

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v2i1.764

Keywords:

rebecca brown, life writing, fictional autobiography, lesbian writing

Abstract

In this article, I will point to several striking parallels that can be drawn between the I-narrators in Rebecca Brown’s oeuvre. These parallels add up to create a personal myth, and they allow us to read the work of this contemporary lesbian author as a serial autobiography. Tracing her autobiographical voice, we can see how Brown’s work upsets generic conventions through the narrators’ namelessness, through the implication that there is no end to autobiography, or through the insight that the truth about one’s self and one’s past is hard to capture because it is inevitably perspectival. The impossibility of attaining this kind of truth ties in with what I see as Brown’s distinctive way of handling a problem of representation that other life writers with marginalized identities tend to deal with rather differently. After all, when Brown’s lesbian self-referential narrators make no effort to hide the difficulty of relating personal recollections and resort to their own idiosyncratic ways of commenting on the unreliability of memory, they upset certain expectations about a narrator’s authority and representativeness that continue to be prompted by autobiographical texts of authors who work from a marginal subject position.

Author Biography

Lies Xhonneux, University of Antwerp

Lies Xhonneux is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is currently putting the final touches to her doctoral dissertation on multiple identifications in the writings of Rebecca Brown. She has presented papers at various conferences and has previously published on the coming out novel, on the intertextual relationship between Rebecca Brown and Samuel Beckett, on reader identification in Brown’s minimalism, and on Brown’s linguistic skepticism.

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Published

2012-12-18

How to Cite

Xhonneux, L. (2012). The Serial Mythology of a Non-Representative Self: Rebecca Brown’s Life Writing. uthorship, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v2i1.764

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Section

Articles