In today's world of overworked academics, the breadth and depth of
scholarship in this book are nothing short of astonishing. Freadman looks
at a huge array of philosophical positions of the will, weighting them with
dense historical footnotes. Yet, despite the dense scholarship, there are
also passages of lucid beauty and arresting phrases. The later chapters of
the book are devoted to fine textual analyses of different autobiographies
and their representations of the will. Perhaps the best chapter is the one
on Hemingway, shot through as it is with sardonic humour, providing some
welcome relief. Not everyone will agree with Freadman's conclusions, but
he is a force to be reckoned with. His book is now an indispensable
starting point for anyone working on autobiography and agency. His survey
of the history of writing on the will is enough to make this book essential
reading for work in this area. |
Many autobiographers share profound questions about human life with their readers—questions like: To what extent was my life imposed on me? To what extent did I bring it about through particular choices and actions, through the activity of my own will? Indeed, the issue of the will is central to autobiographical writing, and some of the greatest autobiographies give extended consideration to the will—its nature; its powers; its limitations; the forms of freedom, constraint, and expression it finds in various cultures; its role in particular human lives.
In this new study, unprecedented in subject and scope, Richard Freadman offers the first sustained account of how changing theological, philosophical, and psychological accounts of the human will have been reflected in the writing of autobiography, and of how autobiography in its turn has helped shape various understandings of the will. Early chapters trace narrative representations of the will from antiquity (the Greeks and Augustine) to postmodernism (Derrida and Barthes), with particular emphasis on late modernity's culture of the will. Later chapters then present detailed and powerfully original readings of autobiographical texts by Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, B. F. Skinner, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, and Diana Trilling.
Freadman's interdisciplinary approach to autobiography and the will includes a theoretical defense of the view that autobiographers are, in varying degrees, agents in their own texts. Threads of Life argues that late modernity has inherited deeply conflicted attitudes to the will. Freadman suggests that these attitudes, now deeply embedded in contemporary cultural discourse, need reexamining. In this, he contends, 'reflective autobiography' has an important part to play. |
