Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl E-Book

Katharina Heyne

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,5, University of Göttingen (Department of American Studies), course: HS American Autobiographies, language: English, abstract: In dieser Seminararbeit behandele ich Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl". Dabei wird das Werk einer genaueren Analyse unterzogen, um es literaturtheoretisch einordnen zu können. Dabei werden unter anderem die amerikanische Autobiographie sowie der slave narrative näher dargestellt. 'Incidents' ist ein slave narrative der besonderen Art, da er von einer Frau geschrieben wurde, die ganz anderen Reaktionen ausgesetzt war wie ein Mann in der damaligen Zeit. Dies wird auch in meiner Analyse deutlich.

Leseprobe

Table of Content

II. Definition of the term Autobiography

III. Types of Autobiographies

1. Slave Narrative

2. Franklin’s Autobiography

3. Sentimental Novel

IV. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

1. The Historical Person of Harriet Jacobs

2. Olney’s Masterplan

a. The Role of a Female Slave

c. Conclusion on Olney’s Masterplan

Page 1

Page 2

. Introduction

II. Definition of the term Autobiography

An autobiography is the story of somebody’s life written by tha t person. The variety of autobiographical documents published in the last centuries makes it necessary to define the term more precisley. Therefore, it has to be differentiated from other genres to be able to rank Harriet Jacobs as an autobiograph. Roy Pascal defines an autobiography as a work that reflects the development of an individual seen from a certain perspective1while James Olney says that an autobiography has to be “a unique tale, uniquely told, of a unique life.”2However, not every story written in the first person is an autobiography, since another criterion is the role of an active and creative choreograph which is the autobiograph. Olney defines it as:

“a recollective / narrative act in which the writer, from a certain point in his life - the present - , looks back over the events of that life and recounts them in such a way as to show how that past history has led to his present state of being.”3

Furthermore, an autobiography is not an enumeration, but a selection of inc idents appropriate to the author’s goal. Therefore, it is not only a reconstruction, but also an interpretation4since it

“represents the writer’s effort, made at a certain stage of life, to portray the meaning of personal experience as it has deeloped over the course of a significant period of timeorfrom the distance of that significant time period.”5