Autobiography or Genre-(in)-Trouble

The concept of autobiography, together with its tropes and figures, is the starting point and focus of central problems and paradigmatic debates within literary- and cultural studies. In my work I do not grasp autobiography in the way of a traditional understanding of a genre or a discipline, but rather as a `mode` in which and through which texts produce subjectivity/identity. Based on this approach I correlate the categories of gender and genre. The project thus discusses the mutual dependency of those categories in different ways. Of central concern are questions of thinking the possibility of reference and the modalities of representation and identity. Part 1 outlines the development of the theorizing of female/feminist autobiographies. Those theories lead from theories of difference to theories of performativity and will be analyzed focussing the interdependency of gender/genre. As a result then this state of the art will be the critical basis for suggesting new developments within this realm at a larger scale. Based on general theoretical reflections part 2 deals with the nexus of the genre autobiography and its tropes with the tropes of gender. Focal point is the development of a project which could be called `autobiographical performativity`. Thereby the phenomenon of gender-identity generated autobiographically will be described as a result of rhetorical and performative gestures and modes of language. Consequently, the concept of `genre` will be refigured and redescribed itself. Part 3 inaugurates a theory of the tropes of autobiography through genealogical and deconstructive reading-strategies. Those strategies could be described as a theory of re/signification out of which a connection to a rhetorical-performative gender-identity will be established on the textual basis of theory of autobiography as well as different autobiographical texts. Part 4 questions the opposition of voice/writing as mode of autobiographical self-constitution. Central issue will be the `being voiced` of the trope of autobiography, namely `prosopopeia`, on the one hand. On the other hand the contradictory usage and positioning of voice and/or writing as instruments of power will be scrutinized and newly perspectivized. Part 5 tries to rethink the tropes of `memory` which are cen-tral for understanding autobiography as modes of a performance of a gendered norm `by heart`. The mutual functioning of the concepts `repetition`/`memory`/`reading` will be examined as a question of the memorized, repeated and read gender-identity. Part 6 explores the positing of a neologism, namely `auto-prosopo-bio-graphy`, as a means of Lacan`s modeling of the subconscious whereby the formation of the ego as a form of `wholeness` turns out to be formatted within a `prosopo-bio-graphical inscription.