In their recent Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson provide a succinct and persuasive historiography of autobiography criticism in the last half of the twentieth century. Early approaches to the subject, Smith and Watson argue, emphasized the transparency and representativeness of individual autobiographical texts and aimed to delineate a canon of life writing. A second wave of critics and theorists were more conscious that autobiography was a matter of construction of self through narrative, rather than a simple transcription of the past; such criticism, nonetheless, was informed by "an ideology of... autonomous selfhood," which in turn influenced "the texts privileged and the practices of self-creation valued" by critics.1 Now a third wave of autobiography criticism challenges "the concept of a unified, sovereign subject" that founds "Western" narratives of progress and reason. If the "unitary self of liberal humanism" still has power in a new millennium, Smith and Watson suggest, it is increasingly being challenged by non-Western narratives that resist, and that emphasize different kinds of subjectivity — performative, community-based, or flexible selves (135). This new wave of autobiography criticism, then, drawing on the apparatus of contemporary literary theory — in particular poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist readings — is very much in line with a concomitant expansion in practices of life writing. (39)
CONNECT TO AUTONOMY BOOK VS MULTIVOCALITY OF DIGITAL TEXTUALITYReferences
Holden, Philip. Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
Last modified 11 July 2008