Autobiography as Self-Ethnography in Italo Calvino’s ‘La poubelle agréée’

Memoir of Italo Serafini

Almost a year has passed since the death of italo Serafini but his memory lives on. in fact, having got over the emotional distress coming from his demise, that seemed unacceptable even though inevitable, we can now sedately pay homage to him as a maestro, colleague and friend. There can be no doubt that professionally he gave infinitely more than he received. For years he was the pre-eminent i...

Saving the Baby: Dennett on Autobiography, Agency, and the Self

Dennett argues that the decentralized view of human cognitive organization finding increasing support in parts of cognitive science undermines talk of an inner self. On his view, the causal underpinnings of behavior are distributed across a collection of autonomous subsystems operating without any centralized supervision. Selves are fictions contrived to simplify description and facilitate pred...

Book Review: Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography

Autistic autobiography.

Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence helping to forge the concepts in which to think autism. This paper focuses on a series of autobiographies that began with Grandin's Emergence. These are often said to show us autism from the 'inside'. The paper proposes that ins...

Augustine’s Confessions: Symbolism in Autobiography

Some scholars have criticized Augustine’s Confessions for lacking structure. In this paper scenes from Augustine’s life depicted in Confessions are analyzed allegorically in order to better understand what his intention may have been as an author. Augustine was a talented writer and it is worth considering that he was aware that Confessions may have had less impact had it been written in a more...