ABSTRACT
It is generally agreed that the foundational work of modern autobiography is a single volume from the late eighteenth century: Rousseau’s posthumously published Confessions, which by dramatically bringing a secular and self-exhibiting self into the literary limelight, also helped to initiate the culture of celebrity that has become so pervasive in our personality and media driven world. It’s a good thing the Genevan philosopher turned autobiographer was not a literary historian, because the famous opening sentence of his book is surely the most inaccurate statement about the genre on record: “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator” (17). The most important predecessor, of course, was the author of the first Confessions, Saint Augustine, though his, nearly a millennium and a half earlier, were God, not self-centered. And as for imitators, there has been for more than two centuries a deluge of secular confessions appealing to the voyeuristic urges of a large reading public catered to by enterprising publishers—and more recently also of the audience of television talk shows that appeal to its prurient interest in other people’s intimate and preferably shameful self-revelations.
