Literary Impostors: Canadian Autofiction of the Early Twentieth Century by Rosmarin Heidenreich (review)

arrives at an interesting recasting of de Man’s dictum in “Autobiography as De-Facement” (1979): “biography,” Swann writes, “can only always be a fleshing out, a belated and reactive attempt to root out or at least naturalize what is constitutively and adamantly virtual in the figure” (10). Which is to say, as I take it, that biography suppresses with its monumentalizing zeal the allegorical potential of the poet-figure that reveals the factitiousness or untimeliness of Romantic subjectivity. At the same time, however, biography is a key to our discovering the potent poet-figures. Suggesting the reciprocal relationship of the poetical text and biography, this formulation might become a good starting point for further research.