Autobiography and Postmodernism

Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literatures - Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others - in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, confession, photography, and the manifesto. The essays examine how different writers respond to the culturally specific pressures of genre, how these constraints are negotiated, and what self-representation reveals about the politics of identity. In contrast to those critics of postmodernism who fear the dissolution of the active subject, the contributors here demonstrate that autobiography gives postmodernism a discourse through which to theorise human agency. The autobiographical subject that emerges is not the decentered human agent of so many versions of postmodernism, but the producer of texts that call attention to the contradictions in dominant modes of self-representation, and demonstrate the possibilities of writing from other locations.

ISBN 087023899X   DEWEY edition DC20 ISBN13 9780870238994 (What's this?)   Pages 336 Publisher University of Massachusetts Press   Volumes 001 Imprint University of Massachusetts Press   Weight (grammes) 658 Format Hardback   Published in Massachusetts Publication date 01 May 1994   Height (mm) 230 Library of Congress PS366.A88A   Width (mm) 165 DEWEY 828.910809492   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

		Preface
		The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre by Leigh Gilmore		3
		Adding to My Life by Andrei Codrescu		21
		The Politics of Genre in Carmen Martin Gaite's Back Room by Christopher Ortiz		33
		Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority by Leigh Gilmore		54
		Autobiographical Voices (1, 2, 3) and Mosaic Memory: Experimental Sondages in the (Post)modern World by Michael M. J. Fischer		79
		Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the "Other" by Betty Bergland		130
		A Geography of Conversion: Dialogical Boundaries of Self in Antin's Promised Land by Kirsten Wasson		167
		Posing: Autobiography and the Subject of Photography by Paul Jay		191
		Plains Indian Names and "the Autobiographical Act" by Hertha D. Wong		212
		Nuptial Interruptions: Autobiographical Boundaries in Wordsworth's "Farewell" by David P. Haney		240
		Identity's Body by Sidonie Smith		266
		"An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn": Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body by Shirley Neuman		293
		Notes on Contributors		317

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