UC Berkeley

“Situating Lives” bridges the study of autobiography and social theory to demonstrate how, since at least the mid-twentieth century, hybrid forms of narration have used personal experiences to advance critical arguments. In contrast to the scholarly tradition that tends to cast self-analysis as a form of narcissistic confession, this dissertation examines autobiographical texts that foreground social groups and generations across six decades of French and Italian literature. Through historical contextualization and careful analysis of works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Luisa Passerini, Annie Ernaux, and Edoardo Albinati, I argue that the emphasis contemporary life-writing places on social relations attests to a revised understanding of critique, whereby discursive modes of social introspection offer new alternatives to universalist paradigms. The autobiographers-critics discussed herein address social phenomena in their personal narratives based on the internal knowledge they gained as individuals situated within a community. This shift from detachment to immanence in experimental life-writing challenges hierarchical models of political commitment, illustrating how critique is a democratic activity that results from self-understanding.

Key to the personal narratives investigated in this study is the way in which these writers represent and interpret social bonds. Each of the four chapters addresses the relationship between collective autobiography and social critique by focusing on the creative modes in which these authors imagine society and intervene in its dynamics. Taking his bourgeois childhood as an example, Sartre casts light on the social grammar that, embodied in everyday practices, intimates to individuals how to relate to one another. In her generational self-portrait, Passerini interrogates the ideological and linguistic mediations that shape both personal experiences and their narration. As she recounts her parents’ life and her own, Ernaux grapples with questions of visibility and agency in low-income milieus, in search of ways to de-singularize the “I” and foster social belonging. In turn, Albinati meditates upon the widespread practices of masculine domination at play in his Catholic education. Such an introspective exercise prompts the author to assess available forms of accountability and social unity within a community fractured by gender violence. Taken together, these chapters point to the richness of critical practices that emerge from situated thinking, as well as to the ambivalences that can arise in interpreting and attempting to reimagine one’s place in society. While accounting for the inseparable ties between individuals and communities, these autobiographers suggest that writing about one’s life means not only engaging with its contexts, but also unfolding its critical implications.