Philippe Lejeune


Philippe Lejeune is a French professor and essayist, known as a specialist in autobiography.
He is the author of numerous works on the subject of autobiography and personal journals. He is a cofounder of the Association pour l'autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique created in Paris in 1992.
In this sense, Lejeune tried to establish a basic theory that allows scholars to better classify this popular genre beginning by providing a definition of autobiography: " the retrospective record in prose that a real person gives of his or her own being, emphasizing the personal life and in particular the 'story of life'." He also formulated the underlying concept of this narrative form: "In order to create an autobiography, the author enters into a pact or contract with the readers, promising to give a detailed account of his or her life, and of nothing but that life."
So the autobiography is characterized by the dual approach of introspection and a claim for truth. Nevertheless, he concedes that there are multiple factors that might constrain the wish to bring one's own life into a readable form.
Novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, upon writing down his own life in Le Miroir qui revient, opposed Lejeune's concept of the autobiographical pact, which sparked a lengthy controversy about the concept among French intellectuals.

Works