SOURCE: Perz, Marianne. “Staging That Summer in Paris: Narrative Strategies and Theatrical Techniques in the Life Writing of Morley Callaghan.” Studies in Canadian Literature 22, no. 1 (1997): 96-116.

In the following essay, Perz contends that Callaghan employs theatrical techniques in his memoir That Summer in Paris.

The people in the principal cafés … might just sit and drink and talk and love to be seen by others.

(Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 100)

In “Mimesis: The Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography,” Evelyn Hinz proposes a new poetics of life writing, one that recognizes life writing's “dramatic affinities” (196). She argues that “drama [i]s the ‘sister-art’ of auto/biography” (196) and writes: “the internal dynamics of life writing are much closer to dramatic art, and the language of the stage affords us a much better vocabulary for describing the impact of this kind of literature than does the critical terminology of prose fiction” (208). There...