Unmaking history: Modern American literary autobiography and the limits of nineteenth century life-writing

My dissertation follows the rhetorical maneuvers of some late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literary self-writers as their expressions of autobiographical selfhood become, in light of the modern era, increasingly subjective, idiosyncratic, and independent of the master narratives that had traditionally given them shape. Of particular note are the representational ramifications of the early modernists' reorganization of the life-story around the perceptual immediacy of the writing subject and a anti-foundational reflective of the pragmatic philosophy of William James and John Dewey, a philosophical approach which, as I argue, helped lay the groundwork for the late nineteenth/early twentieth century American autobiographer's most salient responses to changing aesthetic and ontological conclusions.;The first half of my study charts a transition from a pre-modern, socially constructed autobiographical subject modeled after the American Puritans' representative saint to a subjectively conceived autobiographical self in the late self-stories of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams. As I argue, Whitman's Specimen Days and the final version of Leaves of Grass, Mark Twain's Autobiography, and The Education of Henry Adams pose a concerted challenge to the stability of the socially construed life story by highlighting the representational fallibility and ontological instabilities their authors considered intrinsic to the recording of the historical life-story. The second half demonstrates ways in which William Carlos Williams' Autobiography and In the American Grain and Gertrude Stein's Everyone's Autobiography expand this critique of historical selfhood into the realm of modernist aesthetics.;By presenting the perceiving/writing subject as the pragmatic creator of his or her historical milieu, Williams and Stein transform the challenge to historical selfhood presaged by their literary antecedents into a modernist autobiographical imperative. And in the end, I argue that the representational goals of these pre-modern and modernist self-writers together describe an epistemological transition in which the American autobiographical subject pulled free from its historical and biographical moorings to become an aesthetic figure capable of pragmatically performing rather than simply recording lived experience.