Laura Marcus

Oxford University Press is proud to return to the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival with another series of soap box talks from the very short introductions series.  These free, 15-minute talks feature expert authors from the series and take place twice a day in the Blackwell’s Marquee, next to the Sheldonian Theatre.

From Casanova to Benjamin Franklin to the Kardashians, individuals throughout history have recorded their own lives and experiences. These personal writings are central to the work of literary critics, philosophers, historians and psychologists, who have found in autobiographies from across the centuries not only an understanding of the ways in which lives have been lived, but the most fundamental accounts of what it means to be a self in the world. Goldsmiths’ Professor of English literature and fellow of New College, Oxford, Laura Marcus discusses the autobiographical consciousness, and considers the relationship between psychoanalysis and autobiography.