Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 1 | Page 96

92 Popular Culture Review narrator, and the protagonist (in Anderson).3 Other theorists like Laura Marcus and Karl Weintraub, for example, argue for a kind of ‘honest’ intention which then guarantees the ‘truth’ of the writing”; and Roy Pascal takes it one step further and suggests that if an autobiography is to succeed, it must depend “on the ‘the seriousness of the author, the seriousness of his personality and his intention in writing’ [my emphasis]” (Anderson 2-3). When we pick up an autobiography from the bookstore stacks, we do so assuming that the risk rests only in the writer’s ability to be interesting in the way the story is told. Like other types of genre-designating terms—“novel,” “poem,” “essay,” “play”—the term “autobiography” in the title announces itself as a kind of ai appendage: “an autobiography.” Such a marker is found (usual