Reinventing the Self: Narrative Persona in Five Autobiographical Works of Viktor B. Shklovsky

180 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.Although the works vary in terms of form and content, certain stylistic features and devices make them all unmistakably Shklovskian. An intrusive narrator who both acts in and directs the story is common to all these works. Also consistent is the flippant tone the narrator uses when talking about himself and his family. In addition, he makes clear in these works that he is first and foremost a man of letters and that literature is the most important thing in his life. The five works examined here represent an experiment in autobiography. Ordinarily we acknowledge that autobiography has many possible variations because we see different authors who use the genre differently. In this case, a single author provides a variety of autobiographical works. Shklovsky stretches the limits of autobiography, using and misusing the genre to create works that are difficult to classify.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD