Akadémia Kiadó

Autobiography is not only an adventurous journey into faded memories of childhood but also a language created by the autobiographer in order to give form - even at the expense of distortions - to uncontrolled traces of memory. Rousseau, Gide and Sartre reconstruct the unity of a life period and the development of a personality retrospectively, namely, from a present perspective. However, it would be senseless to expect a complete story, since autobiographies can usually be determined by a fragmentary, broken style due to the alternation of present and past perspectives. The autobiographer interrupts continuously the thread of his life story while enriching autobiographical language with comments, explanations and formulas concerning memory strategies. The alternation of past experience and present point of view modifies largely  autobiographical language which can be analysed by formal, linguistic parameters borrowed from Text Linguistics, Pragmatics and Stylistics. Our purpose is to examine this complex autobiographical perspective on the basis of three „prototypical" autobiographies (Rousseau: Les Confessions, Gide: Si le grain ne meurt, Sartre: Les Mots), and finally, we should also attempt to distinguish autobiography from fiction by linguistic markers and to describe the configurational structure of each work.