Encyclopaedic Autobiography in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1975) and Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004)

This article examines two works of autobiographical literature that are structured in fragmentary form and that engage explicitly with the formal and conceptual model of the encyclopaedia. One of the works, Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) is by a literary theorist, and the other, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004) is by a popular mainstream columnist and broadcaster. Both works, despite a disparity of tone and material, display similar convictions about the utility of what I will call ‘encyclopaedic autobiography’ as a form. I argue that these autobiographical works allow us to reconceive not only of autobiography but of the question of what ‘encyclopaedic literature’ might be.