Throughout his autobiographical oeuvre, Leiris wishes to see his whole life from the vantage point of his present writing and holds poetic expectations of a prosaic medium. He states mid-way through six decades of autobiographical production that “my intention is not that of a memorialist, since rather than reconstitute my life through following it step by step, I wish to dominate it by embracing it in a single glance (a glance situated in time yet already beyond its time)” [
Fibrilles, p. 223]. The form his work takes evolves with its contents: he revealed in an interview in 1973 that he did not establish the structure of his writing in advance [Rambures, 1976, p. 19]; it comes to be as much about defining its own identity as it is about its author’s.
Leiris’s Surrealism in the
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Citation: Wilks, Thomas. "L'Age d'homme and Major Autobiographical Works". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 May 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34655, accessed 31 October 2024.]
