Subject and Place in Bukowski’s Autobiographical Space
This article weighs the advantages of using autobiography to shed light on the conceptual convergence of subject-writer, place and narrative. Its author examines three approaches to the interplay of subject-writer, place and narrative, and demonstrates that these notions, peculiar to literary geography, are seldom considered to equate with one another, conceptually speaking. He advocates an enriched conceptualization of subject (i.e. open to other influences) in which place has a dynamic function and narrative a mediating role. The work of the Californian writer Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is autobiographical in a number of ways, and illustrates the mutually constituent relationships between these three notions. Autobiography, literary or otherwise, is a mine of examples of theoretical and methodological convergence.