Constructions of a Life: (Be)Longing and (Dis)Location in the Autobiographical Writings of Edward Said, Eva Hoffman, and Ihab Hassan

Abstract

This thesis will examine the autobiographical writings of Edward Said, Eva Hoffman and Ihab Hassan, and the main objective will be to study how their individual experiences of cultural translocation shape their narrative constructions of their lives. All three of the selected autobiographies, Said's Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), and Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986), are narratives of transit written from an immigrant perspective. These personal narratives are chosen not because they give voice to the classical or universal experience of entering into a new world, but because they realize and foreground many different aspects of the immigrant condition. Numerous autobiographers have investigated the nature of their home country from the perspective of forced or voluntary exile. All displacements are experienced subjevtively and individually, and these autobiographical accounts have managed to capture and describe three unique experiences of translocation, whether traumatic, dramatic or liberating.