ALTERITY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY: CHARLES LAMB'S "THE ESSAYS OF ELIA"
Vol.10, Issue 2, 2024, pp. 264-275 Full text
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.24.2.3
Web of Science: 001379776600005
Author:
Nazım Çapkın https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6444-6805
Affiliation: Yeni Yüzyıl University, Istanbul, Turkey 04z33a802
Abstract
This article scrutinizes the unorthodox turn in Charles Lamb's autobiographical writing through the figure of Elia with its potential to test the limits of alterity and one's representation of oneself while challenging at the same time the immunity of self as the origin of knowledge and truth. In so doing, this study also maintains that Elia as the autonomous entity calls into question the authority of the writer as well as any claim on teleology and coherence in the act of writing one's own life specifically. To this end, explication of some of the key passages in the essays is informed by Jacques Derrida's theoretical stance towards autobiography in his seminal work The Ear of the Other. In this vein, the article suggests that Elia's individuality and self-consciousness in the essays manifest in unorthodox ways the simultaneous interpretative potential of the figure as the reader of Lamb's life in making.
Keywords: autobiography, otobiography, otherness, alterity, deconstruction
Article history:
Submitted: 13 July 2024
Reviewed: 10 August 2024
Accepted: 18 September 2024
Published: 22 December 2024
Citation (APA):
Çapkın, N. (2024). Alterity in Autobiography: Charles Lamb's "The Essays of Elia". English Studies at NBU, 10(2), 264-275. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.24.2.3
Copyright © 2024 Nazım Çapkın
This open access article is published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. If you want to use the work commercially, you must first get the authors' permission.
Funding:
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
References
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Handling Editor: Boris Naimushin, New Bulgarian University
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