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Abstract
My dissertation is a hybrid autobiography titled A Private Life of Public Signs. As its title indicates, A Private Life of Public Signs explores the tension between private and public experiences and the tensions between lived experiences and the translation of those experiences into written text. The dissertation also engages with the complex nature of the self and the ways in which both the self and the proper name incorporated into an autobiography, whether as a textual act of self-creation or a system of signs devoid of an external referent. In a critical introduction to the dissertation—written as an essay-in-verse—I address the role of the proper name in autobiography, relying on essays by Jacques Derrida and Montaigne. The name simultaneously does and does not refer to the author, effectively severing the author of the autobiography from their own text. In this way, we can also read the proper name as functioning something like an object in the text, since it is reified in a way that prevents it from fully merging into the autobiographical text, but also cannot fully stand outside of it.