Background
Eakin, Paul John was born on March 8, 1938 in Cleveland. Son of Paul James and Jean (Gibson) Eakin.
( Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiograph...)
Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiography is a key text in autobiography studies. In it he proposed that the self that finds expression in autobiography is in fundamental ways a kind of fictive construct, a fiction articulated in a fiction. In this new book Eakin turns his attention to what he sees as the defining assumption of autobiography: that the story of the self does refer to a world of biographical and historical fact. Here he shows that people write autobiography not in some private realm of the autonomous self but rather in strenuous engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails. In so demonstrating, he offers fresh readings of autobiographies by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, William Maxwell, Henry James, Ronald Fraser, Richard Rodriguez, Henry Adams, Patricia Hampl, John Updike, James McConkey, and Lillian Hellman. In the introduction Eakin makes a case for reopening the file on reference in autobiography, and in the first chapter he establishes the complexity of the referential aesthetic of the genre, the intricate interplay of fact and fiction in such texts. In subsequent chapters he explores some of the major contexts of reference in autobiography: the biographical, the social and cultural, the historical, and finally, underlying all the rest, the somatic and temporal dimensions of the lived experience of identity. In his discussion of contemporary theories of the self, Eakin draws especially on cultural anthropology and developmental psychology.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691068208/?tag=2022091-20
( Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy...)
Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069106640X/?tag=2022091-20
Eakin, Paul John was born on March 8, 1938 in Cleveland. Son of Paul James and Jean (Gibson) Eakin.
AB magna cum laude, Harvard College, 1959. Postgraduate, University Paris, 1960. Master of Arts in English, Harvard University, 1961.
Doctor of Philosophy in English, Harvard University, 1966.
Senior Fulbright-Hays lecturer English, U. Paris XII, 1972-1973, 91; senior Fulbright-Hays lecturer English, U. Athens, Greece, 1978-1979; Professor of English, Indiana U., Bloomington, since 1966.
( Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy...)
( Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy...)
( Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiograph...)
Member American Association of University Professors, Modern Language Association, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Sybil Anne Shepard, December 28, 1964. Children: Marion, Emily, Hallie, Hugh.