Oana Elena Strugaru, The mirror of Exile. Autobiography as estrangement in the works of Andrei Codrescu
The mirror of Exile. Autobiography as estrangement in the works of Andrei Codrescu
The present paper deals with the concept of estrangement as a narcissistic projection of Self in the society due to the need of the exiled writer to reconstruct his identity. The writer does so by a process of deterritorialization of his Self in text. The text becomes from this standpoint the environment where identity disseminates in the form of narration and where the individual becomes Subject as character in the literary work. This enables the Self to undergo permanent reconstruction, as every reader of the literary work will put together the image of the character, as the Other, always different. We are going to focus in our paper on the study of the autobiographies of the American writer of Romanian origin Andrei Codrescu, who regards this type of narrative as a means to reconstruct identity in order to integrate without discarding his stranger-self.
Keywords: exile, autobiography, narcissistic estrangement, Codrescu, mirroring
- Codrescu, Andrei “Adding to My life” in Kathleen Ashley; Leigh Gilmore; Gerald Peters, (ed), Autobiography and Postmodernism, Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1994, pp. 21-32.
- Jaques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” in Paul Du Gay; Jessica Evans, (ed), Identity: A Reader, London: Sage, 2000, pp. 44-50;
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, available at http://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidMetamorphoses3.html, visited on 04 August, 2010.
- Jacques Derrida, Points…, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
- Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, New York: Schocken Books, 1985
- Michel Foucault, “Of Others Spaces: Heterotopias”, available at http://foucault.info /documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html, visited on 04 August 2010.
