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Witnessing and Truth: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jacques Derrida's "Poetics and Politics of Witnessing"
- CEA Critic
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 81, Number 3, November 2019
- pp. 240-247
- 10.1353/cea.2019.0030
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Though Eggers's admissions of fictionalizing parts of his memoir might appear to be a clear violation of the author-reader contract, this indictment assumes that truthful autobiography, and memoir as a subgenre, cannot include imagined or revised content. Rather than defining truthful autobiography as the nearest representation of what happened to the autobiographer … [,] truth in autobiography should be defined by authorial intent to tell the truth rather than as a literal representation of past events.