Heidrun Krieger Olinto
(Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

 

 

Abstract: The reflection proposed provides insights on contemporary first person life writing by academics in the field of literary studies. Academic memoirs improved multiple transformations in subject and form, especially during the 1990s, with significant impact on actual knowledge production in institutional contexts. Literary critics and theorists in the space of academe as well as in the role of the traditional intellectual in the public sphere, became increasingly investing in the realm of intimacy, crossing boundaries between the (normally) impersonal position in their professional life and the space of personal experiences and feelings. Attention to the entanglements between the private and the political, between emotion and rationality, in contemporary knowledge production, reveals new attitudes and commitments beginning to change the intellectual climate crossed by controversial struggles about power and privileges, including discontents about reigning discourses and theoretical repertoires. Under such a frame I focus on recent autobiographical experiments in the field of literary historiography that emphasize expressions of emotion and affection in the mediation of psychic aspects, social systems, cultural behavior and political choices, thus revealing the co-presence of a range of acting feelings in the very construction of their theoretical models.

 

 

Key words: academic autobiography, literary theory, historiography