Life fictions: Radicalization of life-writing in Leslie Scalapino’s 'Zither & Autobiography' and 'Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography & Fiction'

摘要

The paper discusses radicalized aesthetics and politics of structure and form in the experimentalautobiographical writing of American avant-garde author Leslie Scalapino. Associated with theinnovative protocols of the “Language School” poetry movement, Scalapino’s oeuvre emerges assimultaneously a poststructuralist and phenomenologically oriented poetics in which writing performsa thoroughgoing scrutiny of how one’s implication in linguistic and cultural matrices determinesone’s being in the world. Scalapino’s Autobiography, framed by Paul de Man’s remarks onautobiographical writing as always controlled by the external expectations of self-fashioning, setsout to examine and deconstruct the autobiographical project as in itself constructive of one’s life.In Zither the poet complicates her take on life-writing by interrogating and reconceptualizing hiddenmechanisms of the genre and confronting it with its own fictional status, while in Dahlia’s irisScalapino juxtaposes detective fiction with a Tibetan form of written “secret autobiography”, basedon a radical departure from the chronology of one’s biography toward a phenomenological horizonof what she refers to as “one’s life seeing”, a practice of attempting to see one’s mind’s constructionsas they are formed by the outside as well as by one’s internalization of the outside.