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Experience, Materiality and the Rules of Past Writing: Interrogating Reference

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the relation between history and autobiography in terms of the ‘rules’ and attitudes relating to their production and consumption. Setting these genres and their related genre expectations side by side serves to emphasize the distinctness of forms of referential ‘past writing’ within the overall field of literary expression. At the same time, looking beyond the commonalities and foregrounding the differences between these two arguably archetypal past-oriented genres contributes to a better understanding of specifically ‘historical’ commitments as well as of attempts to transgress those. Centrally, the apparent disjuncture between many theoretical descriptions and the variety of writing and reading expectations and transgressions in play suggests that existing debates could do more to accommodate current sensibilities regarding referential commitments—especially through a more nuanced thinking of ‘experience’ and ‘materiality.’ To supplement this investigation of changing genre conventions, particularly with respect to tacitly held beliefs concerning the nature of documentation and ‘fact,’ I include a brief example from contemporary literary writing, where the same borders are crossed from the opposite direction.