Conventions of the Autobiographical Mode

FAIN: FB-12542-75

Frank Gado
Trustees of Union College (Schenectady, NY 12308-3256)

- To investigate autobiography as a genre subject to intrinsic formal constrictions and to extrinsic conventions influenced by fictional models and the Geist of the period producing the autobiography. Autobiography will be viewed as a "fiction" so the Formalist and Structuralist critical theories will be studied. Readings will deal with (1) autobiographical writing by early Americans concerned with the quality of an American identity, and (2) 19th and 20th Century immigrants to America. The study of autobiography is devoted to the most immediate of materials—the meaning of one's own life.