Does autobiography matter? : fictions of the self in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus project

Název: Does autobiography matter? : fictions of the self in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus project
Autor: Ward, Wendy
Zdrojový dokument: Brno studies in English. 2011, roč. 37, č. 2, s. [185]-199
Rozsah
[185]-199
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Článek
Jazyk
Licence: Neurčená licence
 

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Abstrakt(y)
In this article, I examine Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon's relationship to and intervention in life-writing. Hemon's fiction provides rich terrain for exploring the key shifts and obstacles facing the genre(s) at present by crossing national as well as aesthetic borders. In doing so, I trace his first autobiographical gestures in his earlier fiction against his recent insistence that his stories are "antibiographical" since they are the very "antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me" – thus, an alternate, unrestrained space in which Hemon can flesh out multiple fictional selves. With his novel, The Lazarus Project, he delivers, in essence, a fictional biography on two levels: a main narrator (Brik) who enacts the author's own exodus but also traces and retells an immigrant stranger's past (Lazarus) in order to work through his present conflicts, anger and sadness. The novel's tensions between biography, autobiography and photography emerge from what Hemon calls a "conditional Americanness" that has overtaken the American Dream. Hemon employs photographic imagery not only to refute given notions of history and archive but also to craft a narrative imagination that builds on late German writer W. G. Sebald's own transgressions within (auto)biographical writing, yet targets and questions more American and cross-cultural identity categories.
Reference
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[2] Adams, Timothy Dow (2008) 'Photography on the Walls of the House of Fiction'. Poetics Today 29(1), 175–195. | DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-022

[3] Baker, Deborah (2008) 'Aleksandar Hemon: Interview'. BOMB Magazine. August 2008. http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3175

[4] Gilmore, Leigh (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

[5] Harris, Stefanie (2001) 'The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten'. German Quarterly 74(4), 379–391.

[6] Hemon, Aleksandar (2008) The Lazarus Project. New York: Riverhead Books.

[7] Hemon, Aleksandar (2001) The Question of Bruno. London: Picador Press.

[8] Johnson, Sarah Anne (2010) 'Interview with Aleksandar Hemon: Rescued by Language'. The Writer Magazine. May 2010. 18–21.

[9] Kaiser, Menachem (2009) 'The Exchange: Aleksandar Hemon'. The New Yorker Online. 9 June 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/06/the-exchange-aleksander-hemon.html.

[10] Krauss, Rosalind (1993) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press.

[11] Lee, Don (2001–2) 'Postscript: Zacharis Award Winner Aleksandar Hemon' [Interview]. Ploughshares 27(4), 203–205.

[12] Long, Jonathan (2003) 'History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten'. Modern Language Review 98(1), 117–137.

[13] Long, Jonathan (2007) W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.

[14] McCulloh, Mark Richard (2003) Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

[15] Reyn, Irina 'Exile on Any Street: In Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon'. Guernica. February 2010. http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1532/not_melted_into_the_pot/

[16] Sebald, W. G. (1996) The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press.

[17] Wood, James (2008) 'The Unforgotten: Aleksandar Hemon's Fictional Lives'. The New Yorker. 28 July 2008. 82.