Victorian Autobiography - Robert Folkenflik (essay date 1993)
Robert Folkenflik (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Folkenflik, Robert. “The Self as Other.” In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 215-34. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.
[In the following essay, Folkenflik studies the treatment of alterity and the self in autobiographical narratives from St. Augustine to Jean-Paul Sartre, with primary reference to several Victorian autobiographers.]
My title may seem to be an abstract version of Rimbaud's “Je est un autre,” and this is certainly a line to which I will return, but what I have in mind, at least initially, is the moment in autobiography in which the subject perceives himself, or less frequently herself, as another self, a frequent though not inevitable feature of the genre.1 I will start with Augustine, not simply because he stands at the beginning of the most influential tradition in...
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