Manhood: Leirisian Autobiography as an Ethnopoetic Intertext

Abstract

Michel Leiris’s lifelong journey of autobiographical écriture had displayed emulations from several artistic and intellectual traditions and yielded various examples of modernist experimentalism. Manhood, his autobiographical narrative of a passage to maturity, is a text that draws both its thematic inspirations and methodical scrupulousness from such diverse resources as Surrealist poetry, ethnography, psychoanalysis and existentialist ethics. The primary aim of this study is to unveil how Leiris, as an autobiographical critic, historically sublated his intellectual resources in the course of maturation to reach his version of committed literature. Secondly, the textual genesis of his autobiography, which was penned almost simultaneously with and embedded within a set of other critical texts and life narratives, will be under scrutiny. Hence, this paper mainly focuses on the way he sculpts his intertextual narrative and creates ethnopoetic authenticity while it sheds light on Leiris’s cultural, artistic and critical formation within the confines of Manhood.