Book/Life Project
In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes describes a project he never undertakes in his own lifetime. He calls it Book/Life, a project that he understands as the reading of a life, one's own, (was it for a year?), through a book. Or was it that the book is read through your life? Maybe he said through an important or a significant book, at least that's how I understand his point.

There are some fundamental problems with Barthes's proposal, or at least attendant assumption or positions invited by it. First, the fact that all reading takes place through one's life, as it has configured one's brain. How else could writing occur? Similarly, one's life is read as and through textualities engaged in the years leading up to and coterminus with the project. And finally, following the years of attack on concepts of canonicity, we know that what counts as significant or important literature can rarely be assumed and must instead be elaborated in terms specific to the individual reader or writer.

When I finish my work on "Family Fictions: An Autoanalysis," I plan to start a Book/Life project. (In fact, my preoccupation with this new project is one of the signals that my current one needs to be concluded so that I can move on.) I've thought a lot about this one book (not that every book isn't filled with many) that I want to spend so much time thinking about and through. Clearly, an important choice. At first, because he always has this effect on me, I thought of reading something by Roland Barthes -- A Lover's Discourse or Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. After all, my debt to his idea is enormous. But considering my poor French, I rejected this idea in favor of someone I've always wanted to write a book about, having already written a chapter on her in my book (Sem)Erotic: GERTRUDE STEIN.

Most people without a background in modernism don't realize how much Stein wrote. Right off, I reject The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, despite the amusing spin it puts on the genre (Stein's name doesn't even appear on the spine of the first edition), because it is the one book that everyone reads if they are going to read something by her. I could read Ida which is a very funny, wonderful book about identity ("I am I because my little dog knows me"). Then I thought of the big books, The Making of Americans and The Geographical History. . . ., but I would prefer not to engage head on Stein's theories of character type and national character. Then I thought of Everyone's Autobiography, an wonderful choice for a project like this. Every vs. auto, Stein's auto having been read as and through every. For me too, every is an important part of auto.

If there is sufficient graduate student interest, I would like to use this idea as the basis for a 500 or 600 level course in the Spring of 2000.

"The Book/Life (take some classic book and relate everything in life to it for a year)"
RB 150.

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