Notes for Age of Enlightenment/Franklin’s Autobiography (Book I)

Autobiography as a Genre

-         “Ontologies of the self”—(ontology:  the study of being:  an ontology of the self is a person’s account of how he or she came to be)

Ex:  [T]he Thing most like living one’s Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life; and to make that Recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in Writing” (Autobiography, Part I)

-         Ontologies as a form of mythmaking: “the autobiographer’s backward gaze doesn’t just tell events—it sees them as part of a design that exists only because the writer had decided that one explanation (and no other) makes sense of his life” (Bauer).  Hence, the autobiographer’s story of an event “isn’t an objective reconstruction of the past.  Instead, it is part of a tale constructed by a writer who has much in common with a novelist; [the writer] is making a point and marshalling his plot points so that they lead to a climactic interpretation. . . he chooses a meaning for his life and arranges the events of his life to reflect that meaning” (Bauer).

Some Principles of Autobiography (Howarth)

-         from Roy Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography-“The ‘true’ autobiography. . . is for both the author and reader ‘a spiritual experiment, a voyage of discovery.’”

-          Autobiography is a literary version of (a self-portrait); in autobiography vision and memory remain essential controls (Is memory reliable? Does it change with time and experiences? Is it trustworthy?)

-     Elements of Autobiography

                1) Character: determined by sense of place, self, history, and motives for writing

                2) Technique: determined by stylistic structures (tense or person), imagery, metaphor, and tone

                3) Theme: determined by those ideas and beliefs that give an autobiography its meaning (in the broadest sense, the theme is life); themes may arise

                out of an author's general philosophy, religious faith, political or cultural attitudes

                ***Natural Progression from Motive to Method to Meaning***

-      Autobiography as Oratory

                -"Style is the Man"

                -"Rhetoric becomes a landscape of his own mind" (How/Where do we see this the Autobiography?)

                -"Work makes the story, story remakes the work"

                 -"[The] concoction of private and public motives complicates the autobiographer's claim to 'truth'"

**Questions for Consideration:  What meaning, or mythic pattern, does Franklin choose for his life?  How has this mythic pattern become a trope for the American self?

Autobiography, Book I

1)      Franklin’s acknowledgment of God (p. 232)

2)      Franklin’s proclamation of Deism (p. 267)

3)      Franklin’s work

a.       Printing (p. 238)

b.      Newspaper (p. 271)

c.       Money printing (p. 273)

d.      Subscription Library (p. 276)

4)      Man of True Reason (p. 253)