Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color.

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Barbara Rodriguez. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xii + 228 pages.

Autobiography studies have undergone radical sea changes over the past thirty years. Where they were once the peripheral interest of scholars for the most part responsibly engaged with history or literature, they have become the passion of mainstream academics, active at the MLA and other major conferences, presenting at dedicated conferences around the world, monopolizing two major journals in the United States alone, and publishing a steady stream of hefty monographs. Literary scholars and historians have not only made autobiography studies mainstream, they have also infected their colleagues in a remarkable range of other disciplines and begun to claim, indeed, rich interdisciplinary opportunities.

Further, autobiography studies have moved from generic concerns (in the 1970s) to exploration of the multiple processes, methodologies, and artifacts that represent identity. Not least, autobiography studies, which began most energetically with work on the great white fathers of European literature (pace Saint Augustine), have been transformed by feminist theorists, by the Civil Rights movement and subsequent articulations of African American identity, by the AIDS epidemic and the Gay Liberation movements, and by the past thirty years of Aboriginal activism. The list could go on. The general point is surely observation of a paradigm shift not only from literary appreciation through all the permutations of scholarship that come with poststructuralism but also a paradigm...

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