A Study Of The Biographical Textual Feature Of Advertisements For Myself

Advertisements for Myself is the autobiography of Norman Kingsley Mailer, in which he totally breaks the traditional narrative form of autobiography. It collects lots of his earlier works including war novel, episodes of novel, columns of Village Voice, The White Negro, and episode of Deer Park. Advertisement for Myself’ is not only the watershed of his writing style, but also expresses his emotions disguisedly. Because of the special form, this work attracts many younger writers’ attention. Thus, this special autobiography deserves comprehensive and further research academically. However, such research is quite rare, which offers a chance as well as a challenge for the thesis.Advertisements for Myself has employed fiction and fact as a literary form of conveying the writer’s real emotions, which is creative in writing one’s autobiography. In terms of literary strategy, the book has adopted intertextuality which is an expansion of literary strategy in autobiographical writing. This thesis mainly makes an interpretation on the form of fiction and fact and the literary strategy of intertextuality in Advertisement for Myself. Through the interpretation, the thesis presents Mailer’s criticism on totalitarianism and his power to break the control of totalitarianism. By analyzing the textual features of Mailer’s autobiography, this thesis evaluates its literary significance and to explore a new access to academic research on Mailer’s works.