Autografia i powtórzenie

Abstract

The paper discusses dialectical tension between originality and repeatability in modern and post-modern autography (i.e. autobiography, or self-writing, in the broadest, trans-generic and trans-discursive sense of the term). The ideology of self-writing is based on the cult of individuality and exceptionality of life and text. Nevertheless, its realizations are inevitably marked by repetition and reproduction, both in the inner realm of given author's oeuvre (recurring characters and interpersonal relations, reappearing places, events and themes; self-intertextuality) and in the outer contexts (replicating conventional discourse and existential patterns, imitating textual or rhetorical structures, different forms of intertextuality).