Lives without Stories. For a Semiotics of the Literary Self-portrait

Abstract

The present work is a reflection on certain texts, which share many of the characteristics of the portrait, being their modern name "literary self-portrait." It is a very old genre, ignored and marginalized -or indiscriminately included with the essays-by the modern poetics, which holds Rousseau's Confessions as the ground zero for the writings on the self. In order to describe its peculiar mode of communication, here self-portraits are confronted with some concepts of the philosophy of the image (Jean-Luc Nancy), and of semiotics (Umberto Eco).