Self-portrait in Literary Memoirs: From Personal Expression to Ontological Construction

Abstract

In modern Vietnamese literature, artistic memoirs affirm their significant role not only as a means of recording the literary history but also as an artistic space that portrays the portraits of artists, especially of the writers themselves. Literary memoirs express the author’s multidimensional “self” through memories and thoughts about friends and colleagues, and concerns about art, thereby constructing vivid and humane portraits. Moreover, literary memoirs constitute a mode of self-construction through autobiographical strategies, in which the author selects and reconstructs memories to intentionally form the “self”. With their linguistic mastery, self-division, and self- reflexivity, writers have transformed the memoir genre into a distinctive discourse, contributing to the formation of personal identity through writing and artistic creation. This paper examines the representation of the “self” in literary memoirs while suggesting an academic approach to the genre: analyzing the memoirist’s self-portrait from two perspectives: personal self-expression and ontological construction, which is crucial for understanding the particularities of the genre, especially in the field of literary memoirs.