Burt E.S. Regard for the other. Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde

New York: Fordham University Press,.2009.—281.—ISBN: 978-0-8232-3090-7This book had two widely separated periods of gestation, with one piece dating from an early monograph on Rousseauian autobiography that
never saw light of day. In the numerous studies that have been devoted to autobiography in the past 30 years, surprisingly few take on directly the question of the other. The reason for the surprise is simple enough: One can hardly envision the self without the other against which it is defined or an autobiography that does not involve the other both in its narrative and as the one to whom the ‘‘I’’ addresses itself in its act of confessing. In representing itself, the I must not only represent the others encountered in life, but must also address that representation to another. What is more, such representations are confided to an indeterminate third thing: a text, which is to say, to an autobiographical writing both fictional and documentary in nature.1 There is thus, if not exactly a third other, at any rate a third alterity to contend with whose effects the autobiographer has to calculate. Why, then, has there been so little direct critical attention to the problem?