Abstract
This chapter explores the kind of truth an (auto)biography can offer concerning the subject’s life. Any truth such a text offers will necessarily be problematic: it can never be more than a reconstruction from the point of view of the moment of writing, in various ways stylised. The chapter then turns to consider some work of Arendt on the concept of agency and argues, first, that our agency is decentred, that is, depends on social, political, and other forces the individual agent cannot fully know or control and, second, that (auto)biographical writing needs to take this into account. The chapter goes on to argue that there is nothing in an (auto)biography that could count as telling the truth of a life.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1968]. The Storyteller. In Illuminations, ed. Harry Zorn and intro. Hannah Arendt. London: Pimlico.
Berger, John. 2016 [1967]. A Fortunate Man: the Story of a Country Doctor. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Cowley, Christopher. 2014. The Philosophy of Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Dillon, Brian. 2003. Accessed December 20, 2016. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/shadowed-by-misfortune-1.351481.
Eakin, Paul John. 1988. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Goldie, Peter. 2014. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gosse, Edmund. 2004 [1907]. Father and Son. Edited by Michael Newton. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gusdorf, Georges. 1980. Conditions and Limits of Autobiography. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hampshire, Stuart. 1989. Innocence and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Holmes, Richard, ed. 2005. Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. London: Harper Perennial.
Johnson, Samuel. 1831 [1779/81]. The Lives of the English Poets. London: John Sharpe.
Lamarque, Peter. 2007. On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, ed. Daniel Hutto, vol. 60, 117–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levi, Primo. 2007 [1986]. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi.
Lloyd, Genevieve. 1986. The Self as Fiction: Philosophy and Autobiography. Philosophy and Literature 10 (2): 168–185.
Mulhall, Stephen. 2013. Autobiography and Biography. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Thomas Eldridge. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. 2011. Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988 [1886]. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. In Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Band 5. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Olney, James. 1980. Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical and Bibliographical Introduction. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Orwell, George. 1984 [1970]. ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’. In The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Pascal, Roy. 2015. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2008 [1789]. Confessions. Edited by Patrick Coleman and translated by Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2012 [1964]. Les mots. Paris: Gallimard.
Self, Will. 2015. Accessed December 20, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/08/on-the-move-a-life-oliver-sacks-review-autobiography-neurologist.
Serres, Michel. 1985. Les cinq sens. Paris: Grasset.
Spengemann, William C. 1980. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Stelzig, Eugene L. 1988. Hermann Hesse’s Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stuart, Francis. 2014. Accessed December 15, 2016. https://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/francis-stuart/.
Warner, Martin. 2016. The Aesthetics of Argument. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 2008. Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hamilton, C. (2018). ‘No One Is the Author of His Life’: Philosophy, Biography, and Autobiography. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54793-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54794-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)