SOURCE: “Heinrich Böll, Primo Levi, and Saul Friedländer: Portrayals of Self and History,” in Connecticut Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 41-9.

In the following essay, Rugoff compares Levi's The Periodic Table, Heinrich Böll's What's to Become of the Boy? Or: Something to Do with Books, and Saul Friedländer's When Memory Comes, and contrasts these authors' memoirs with the philosophy of Paul de Man.

As the literary canon has been reviewed and redefined in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many discussions of autobiography have been undertaken by various critics, including Paul de Man, the late chair of Comparative Literature at Yale. Toward the end of his career, but in keeping with his focus upon a text's linguistic inconsistencies as opposed to the construct of an interpretation of it or of the author's intention, de Man argues in “Autobiography as De-facement” that autobiography “lends itself poorly to...