Through the Looking Glass – Writers′ Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century

Through the Looking Glass provides a detailed and comprehensive study of the writer’s memoir and an exploration of the genre’s poetics. It presents the critical history of memoir and develops its own definition of the genre by focusing on such markers as phantasmatism of the pact between writer and reader, (auto)biographism of the space inhabited by the text, syllepsism of the subject, detotalization in terms of scope, and thematic content. The study also proposes an original typology of fifteen micro-genres of memoir (souvenirs d’enfance, souvenirs d’adolescence, falling away memoir, memoirs/scenes from life, patriography, matriography, parental memoir, autrememoir, pet memoir, [auto]pathography, [auto]thanatography, travelogue, periegetic memoir, ekphrastic memoir, and bibliomemoir). Out of over forty memoirs addressed by this study, five writers’ memoirs (by Andrew Motion, Rachel Cusk, Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, and J.M. Coetzee, respectively) are addressed in greater detail and thus acknowledged as the genre’s prime specimens.