Frederick douglass autobiography excerpts

Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction Dan Shen Center for European and American Literatures, Peking (Beijing) University Dejin Xu College of English Language and Literature, University of International Business and Economics Abstract This essay attempts to deine unreliability in autobiography and explore its major forms and features in relation to unreliability in iction.

It starts with the construction of a narratological framework for autobiography, especially in terms of the narrative communicative situation. Then it goes on to discuss two contrasting approaches to ictional unreliability, the rhetorical and the cognitivist or constructivist.

The rhetorical approach deals, in an idealized way, with the gap between the narrator and the implied author and is only concerned with the “implied” or “authorial” reader (critics who tr