“Now that I Have Written it Out, I May Even Begin to Forget it All”: Subject, Memory and Representation in W. B. Yeats’s Autobiographies and Journals

Abstract

Beginning with a discussion of the growing interest that forms of writing about the self has aroused among both critics and readers, this article focuses on the theoretical aspects that distinguish the practice of Irish writer W.B. Yeats in two types of writings about the self: the autobiography proper and the journal. My analysis draws from theoretical sources of diverse national contexts to bring a panorama of the main critical discussions of this important Anglophone author to the Brazilian public. Yeats figures as an exemplary subject for exploring how the subject-writer is constituted, the (im)possibilities of memory, and their representation in the writerly space, particularly given the wealth of material he left in these genres. As an exemplum, Yeats is a particularly apt subject due to the tradition of genetic and biographical studies that have always characterized Yeatsian criticism, as well his own preoccupation with these very questions in all the genres of his extensive oeuvre