Sherston's Imaginary Friend

Siegfried Sassoon's Autobiographical Prose and the Idea of Photography

Bibliographic Data

ID4791183
AuthorsSusan Bruce (0000-0002-1844-2742, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume30
Issue2
Pages173-193
Publication date2007-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueBiography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-4962 • E-ISSN: 1529-1456
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/bio.2007.0034
OpenAlexW1980885350
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited7

In this essay, I take Siegfried Sassoon's prose works as exemplary of a construction of selfhood peculiar to what I call "narratives of hindsight": mid-twentieth-century narratives whose first person narrator is constructed out of two selves-an older self who writes, and a younger whose experience he or she relates-whose dual perspectives overlay and mediate each other, neither ever dominating or achieving authoritative veracity with respect to the other. I argue that this familiar (but historically specific) construction of selfhood-in-time is enabled by, and contingent upon, the rise of photography, whose advent ushers in new ways of relating to our pasts, and to our past selves. More generally, insofar as Sassoon is concerned, I illustrate broader ways in which his compulsive reiteration of his past is mediated through an imagination and a memory which is ineluctably photographic, and I try to show the ways in which his "autobiographies," both "real" and "fictionalized," are indebted, in general and in particular ways, to early photographic images

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Hindsight bias · Literature · Narrative · Photography · Psychoanalysis · Subjectivity · The Imaginary · Visual arts · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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