The Hypostases of the Reader in Post-Totalitarian Autobiographical and Memorialistic Writing
To the extent that personal histories, destined for publication, are created in relation to a universe of reception, identity discourses undergoing constraints conditioned by the “official self-presentation” (P. Bourdieu), autobiographical and memorialistic stories published in post-communist Romania cannot be interpreted outside a connection with the reader, as social individual and textual instance (the implied reader): reconstructing a “totalizing” history where to recognized himself, the author-narrator textually projects his “ideal” image of the self (even when he simulates objectivity, going as far as self-criticism), capable of “seducing” the real reader, while also creating its implied reader, as textual strategy. In our article, we intend to trace the manner in which the post-war writer relates, in the present, in the “life stories”, to his own positioning in the cultural field circumscribed to the age of dictatorship and to identify, from the perspective of the aesthetics of reception, the role played by the reader – real, as well as implied – in the identity reconstructions detectable at the level of the texts in the corpus.
Keywords: autobiographic and memorialistic narrative, (auto)biographical ideology, narrative identity, horizon of expectation, implied reader
Corpus
Studies