NUEVOS ELEMENTOS PARA EL ESTUDIO DE LA AUTOBIOGRAFÍA

Abstract

This paper focuses on the genre of autobiography from several points of view. Its aim is to demonstrate in what sense autobiography should be seen as an open genre rather than a closed one. Traditionally the autobiography has been considered as a genre whose specifications made it "closed", which often meant that there was a quite stable link between its theoretical defintion and the reality of the written works, but it is shown here that today the way autobiography has evolved should make us consider the genre as an open one. I propose to consider several cases in Spanish modern autobiography that clearly show how the traditional view is no longer applicable. My corpus contains mainly works by Martínez Sarrión, Castilla del Pino, Jorge Semprún, Terenci Moix and Juan Goytisolo and shows the tensions that have allowed the development of the genre at several levels: the tension between tradition and innovation at the generic series level, the tension between what is autobiographical and what is heterobiographical at the thematic level, the tension between what is personal and what is universal at the reception level, the tension between the collection of the author's essential facts and the fact that he or she semantic level, the tension between a "neutral" style and a personal or "literary" style at the stylistic level, the tension between the presence and the absence of an internal receiver at the structural level, and finally the tension between the telling and the showing at the pragmatic level.