ABSTRACT

This essay explores the achievement of the gay American author Edmund White’s numerous autobiographies and memoirs. After surveying the formal and thematic variety of White’s individual life writings, it then questions why nearly all of them were written after the explosion of gay life writing that took place in the United States beginning in the 1970s, that is, after the periods of greatest struggle for homosexual emancipation and the fight against AIDS. The essay argues that White’s non-fiction memoirs subtly re-configure the nature of the genre itself. Rather than explaining the narrator’s sexual difference to an audience not entirely aware of homosexuality (as did much early gay life writing) or struggling to find a voice in a homophobic society (one of the great themes of White’s autobiographical fictions), White’s non-fictional autobiographies establish a self-assured voice that presumes the world can be usefully examined and explained by the individual gay subject. They situate the gay speaker at the centre rather than on the margins of American and Western culture. Using the form to understand the world from a gay perspective, White merges sociological analysis with traditional forms of life writing to create something new in the American gay canon.

摘要

这篇文章探讨了美国同性恋作家埃德蒙怀特的众多自传和回忆录的成就。在调查了怀特个人生活作品的形式和主题多样性之后，它质疑为什么几乎所有这些作品都是在 1970 年代开始在美国发生的同性恋生活写作大爆发之后写的，也就是说，在最伟大的时期之后争取同性恋解放和抗击艾滋病。这篇文章认为，怀特的非小说回忆录巧妙地重新配置了体裁本身的性质。与其向不完全了解同性恋的观众解释叙述者的性别差异（就像许多早期的同性恋生活写作一样）或努力在恐同社会中寻找声音（怀特自传小说的伟大主题之一），怀特的非虚构自传建立了一种自信的声音，认为世界可以被个人同性恋主体有效地检查和解释。他们将同性恋演讲者置于中心而不是美国和西方文化的边缘。怀特利用这种形式从同性恋的角度理解世界，将社会学分析与传统的生活写作形式相结合，在美国同性恋经典中创造了一些新的东西。