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its imaginative art and naive, believing in the sincerity of the author’s intention to present
the story of ‘a real person concerning his own existence” (xiii).
4. Geoffrey Nunberg considers the colon to be a kind of punctuation which is “genreindependent” since it can be used “in every written genre from a personal letter to a
published article (thereby excluding, for example, footnotes, block quotations, bullet items,
the newlines used in poetry and lists)” (18). He also suggests that colons are “text category
indicators,” that is, a graphical device in which a non-alphanumeric character is used “to
provide information about structural relations among elements of a text” (17).
5. See as well Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in Acts of Literature (221-252). For
Derrida, a text’s participation within a genre marks both inclusion and exclusion; that is,
the term “genre” “gathers together the corpus and, at the same time, in the blinking of an
eye, keeps it from closing, from identifying itself with itself’ (231).
1. It might seem ingenuous to use the term “metaphor” in a discussion of the Dialogic,
since, as Bakhtin writes in “Discourse in the Novel,” “it is impossible under any condition
or any time to imagine a trope [say, metaphor] being unfolded into two exchanges of
dialogue,” since “[t]he polysemy of the poetic symbol presupposes the unity of a voice
with which it is identical.” However, “as soon as another’s voice, another’s accent, the
possibility of another’s point of view breaks through this play of symbol, the poetic plane
is destroyed and the symbol is translated onto the plane of prose” (327-328). Not only the
possibility of another’s voice, but the actuality of voices wrestling with the idea of veils
and veiling “destroys” the poetic and reaffirms the dialogic in Moody’s memoir.
7. The idea of autobiography situating itself as a genre is also made problematic, of
course, by Paul De Man’s assertion the autobiography should not be considered as a genre
at all; rather for him it is “a figure of reading or understanding that occurs . . . in all texts”
(70). And thus, as Anderson points out, for DeMan, autobiography produces “fictions or
figures in place of self knowledge” (13); the author of the text reads himself as personified
by himself and thus he is always removed from the self he seeks. Unlike Bakhtin’s
questioning of the idea of genre, De Man’s assessment is a poetic interpretation and
Bakhtin’s dialogic.
8. The quote (in Kent’s essay) is from Bakhtin’s “Speech Genres,” found in Speech
Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vem W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986), p 68.
9. In the essay “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” James Olney reminds us that
the focus on the word “autobiography” should rest on the autos since the notion of “self’
should take precedence over the notion of “life” (bios). He says, “Prior to the refocusing
from bios to autos there had been a rather naive threefold assumption about the writing of
an autobiography: first that the bios of the autobiography could only signify ‘the course of
a lifetime’ or at bast a significant portion of a lifetime; second, that the autobiographer
could narrate his life in a manner at least approaching an objective historical account and
make of that internal subject a text existing in the external world; and third, that there was
nothing problematical about the autos, no agonizing questions about identity, no self
definition, self-existence, or self-deception—at least none the reader need attend to—and
therefore the fact that the individual was himself narrating the story of himself had no
troubling philosophical, psychological, literary, or historical implications” (20) However,
it was “this turning to autos—the ‘I’ that coming awake to its own being shapes and