"Shades of Deeper Meaning":
On Writing Autobiography
MARy JANE DICKERSON
Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That's good,
but not good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It
takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.
Maya Angelou
In this passage from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
describes the process of language which eventually pulled her out of a selfimposed silence that followed her rape. She remembers her grandmother's
neighbor, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, who, during long afternoons of talking and
reading aloud, restored the nine-year-old gir1's desire to communicate, thus
enabling her to begin a dialogue-a dialogue with others (in and out of
books), with landscapes and events, and with herself-the dialogue that goes
into constructing the Maya Angelou who exists not in isolation but in a
context filled with the sounds of "what country people called mother wit
... the collective wisdom of generations" (83). This ability to "infuse"
language with qualities of the human voice in a cultural dialogue is what links
the personal voice with a public one in autobiography to shape a distinctive
social discourse. Writing autobiography demands a trying-out or soundingout of identities and roles, as Angelou appears to recognize when she accepts
Mrs. Flowers' advice that she "try to make a sentence sound in as many
different ways as possible" (82). These tensions between words and voices,
between the oral and the written, suggest how autobiography defines itself as
a system of voices, with the author in a dialogic relationship with the elusive
nature oflanguage and with others who identify themselves through their own
"many different ways to make a sentence sound." Thus, autobiography is a
sophisticated form of composing-one particularly appropriate, as I will
suggest in this essay, for the advanced composition classroom.
Autobiography as Social Discourse
An understanding of how the autobiographical text comes into being
through an ongoing interplay of dialogue reveals it as a social discourse most
readily available for advanced writing students to analyze and examine the
intricate interrelationships between writer, text, and world while they are
actively producing such texts themselves. In order to situate autobiography
136 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
as a form of social discourse appropriate for activating and refining a critical
consciousness in advanced college writers, it's useful to refer briefly to
current theory and research. As composition theory and pedagogy have been
moving away from personal writing and cognitive concerns and toward
public writing and social concerns, literary theory and practices have become
more interested in how the personal nature of reading and the intticate
relationships between writer, reader, and text are constituted by history,
society, and culture.! On occasion, the canonical conversation even expands
to include a wide range of autobiographical texts, as if to acknowledge that
the sphere of the personal as a way to know the world is epistemologically
sound. In addition, renewed interest in the ways voice works dialogically in
texts for the reader and the writer has helped us get a sense of how both writing
and reading implicate us within community, ideology, and culture on both
local and globallevels. 2 To borrow Richard Rodriguez's image, writing
autobiography makes one "a citizen in a crowded city of words" (32).
In order to show more precisely how autobiography locates the individual
as writer and reader within the community as an open text that opens texts,
consider Warwick Wadlington 'srecent study ,Reading Faulknerian Tragedy.
Wadlington synthesizes what he has distilled from Kenneth Burke (the
performative), Mikhail Bakhtin (the dialogic), and Clifford Geertz (the
culturally reproduced) to analyze Faulkner's tragic novels as complex and
creative cultural expressions of tragedy. Wadlington's descriptions of how
writer, reader, and text interact toward a cultural completion provide a
framework to examine autobiography as a self-in-the-making within a rich
context of socio-historical exchange:
Human beings are biologically incomplete and, without culture, helpless
animals who become capable persons, and continue to become capable
persons, by enacting personae selected by imitation from the repertoire
offered by their culture and social structure. But the repertoire exists only
within the specific varying perfonnances of others, imprinted with their
particular styles and "accents." All, then, are engaged in concrete. mutually
shaped enactments in a complex dialogue with others as well as with their own
already acquired internalized roles. One simultaneously becomes and influences others to become a confederation of persons by "trying on," selecting,
and habituating oneself to roles. In this actively seeking, evaluative, and selfdefensive process of becoming and reproduction. no one identity, "voice,"
can be duplicated exactly. All are handed on to another, to the degree they are,
in fonns transmuted by idiosyncratic accents. As in sexual reproduction,
identity in its transmission is mediated and thereby modified by another.
(31-32)
Although Wadlington is primarily concerned with what happens to
Faulkner's readers as they read his novels, his theoretical construct of taking
on roles in performance, of engaging in dialogue with others, the culture, and
Writing Autobiography l37
the past to create the present, and of reproducing identity through textual
mediation apply equally to what takes place when writers produce and
describe their autobiographical texts. Also, Wadlington's work, although
concentrated on the practice of literary theory, is reminiscent of Jerome
Bruner's, "Life as Narrative," in which he makes connections between
critical thinking and autobiography: "Philosophically speaking, the approach I shall take to narrative is a constructivist one-a view that takes as its
central premise that 'world making' is the principal function of mind, whether
in the sciences or in the arts" (575). Recognizing the constructivist view that
we "make" our stories, Bruner poses an important question: "Does that
mean our autobiographies are constructed, that they had better be viewed not
as a record of what happened ... but rather as a continuing interpretation and
reinterpretation of our experience?" (575). While Wadlington grounds his
study in reading narrative in novels and Bruner grounds his inquiry in selfnarrative rendered in speech, both mention some common sources-Geertz
and Burke-as the basis for their speculation. Both scholars offer a framework to explore autobiographies as written texts of self-making and worldmaking emerging from an interactive process in which the autobiographer's
voice comes into its own through hearing itself in conversation with others
and against the material reality of a landscape.
Constructing Self Through the Dialogic Imagination
A recent autobiography, Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments: AMemoir, exemplifies this productive interplay between self, others, and place. Its
narrative emerges from a years-long dialogue between mother and daughter
whose intense relationship defines both their lives: "The antagonism between us is no longer relentless. We have survived our common life, if not
together at least in each other's presence, and there is a peculiar comradeship
between us now. But the habit of accusation and retaliation is strong so our
conversation is slightly mad these days" (199). Later, after another altercation, Gornick records the conversation that ends the book: "My mother
breaks the silence. In a voice remarkably free of emotion-a voice detached,
curious, only wanting information-she says to me, 'Why don't you go
already? Why don't you walk away from my life? I'm not stopping you.'"
To which, Gornick replies, "I know you're not, Ma" (204). The dialogue is
only interrupted, not ended, by these final words printed on the last page.
Their conversations on the streets of Manhattan ,over coffee in cafeterias, will
continue making and unmaking these two women as long as they live.
Autobiography's origin as narrative that arises from a dialogue with the
self and about the self in relation to others and a particular cultural landscape
distinguishes autobiography and makes it especially appropriate for teaching
advanced writing students about the subtle features inherent in the complex
act of writing as social discourse. It is a dialogic system of speaking, writing,
and reading in which the student writer addresses the self, others, texts, signs,
138 Journal of Advanced Composition
and what goes on in the writer's culture. The element of perfonnance
pervades texts as writers voice themselves into being by speaking and
behaving from varied perspectives. For example, one student, Kristen,
presents herself through a sequence of conversations with "Women I Love
Best," in which she recreates significant relationships and' 'voices" herself
from early childhood to the present, coming to tenns with the ambiguities of
sexual identification and the inevitable losses and separations of growing up.
Here are the final words of Kristen' s imagined dialogue with a high school
friend who committed suicide:
I saw a pair of red RED very red acrylic mittens your mother was knitting for
you. I got a box at Christmas time from your mother. It was those mittens.
I wore them sliding at the Country Club and they made my hands cold. I keep
looking over my shoulder expecting to see you. . .. I turn around again.
Turning and turning around never catching the blind spot. You follow me.
Kristen's dialogues reveal different sides of herself, the varying voices and
roles she is in the process of assuming along the way toward becoming.
Indeed, it is this self-conscious projection into the text of the speaking self
in dialogue with others and with parts of the surrounding culture that separates
the autobiographer's voice from the ways writers usually represent and
present themselves in other genres of nonfiction. This happens because the
autobiographer's voice is engaged in the creation ofitself as both subject and
object through language, creating a self who lives beyond the personal
landscape, who now lives in history's flow even as the self-making/wordmaking process continues.
In Black Boy, Richard Wright informs us about this subtle creativity
inherent in the dialogic nature of autobiography: "Each event spoke with a
cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded
meanings" (12). In a headnote to a recent essay, Ursula K. Le Guin makes
even more explicit the social nature of such autobiographical writing, thus
illustrating the "dialogic imagination" at work:
This essay has been given as a lecture six or seven times. I rewrote it each time,
guided by responses, questions, letters after each lecture. I look on it,
gratefully, as a collaboration with my listeners, my editors and all the writers
whose works and words I pieced together in it-ancestors, strangers and
friends. (1)
Yet the collaborative autobiographical act-engaging in dialogue with
"ancestors, strangers and friends"-always means exposing oneself to the
risk of facing what such disclosure of the self means. But writing that
encourages such risk-taking and even defines itself through those risks
advances self-education. Le Guin, through her conversations with others as
well as through her confronting and exploring women writers creating both
Writing Autobiography 139
texts and children, discovers what it means to free oneself through the act of
writing, even momentarily; she imagines a dialogue in which •• a woman
writing [is woman] fishing the mind's lake. But in this, responsible; in this,
autonomous; in this, free" (37).
Through its potential for self-knowledge in constructing text as "fishing
the mind's lake" for what it contains of selfand world, autobiography defines
the writer's present Here is how one student talks to himself and his world
in his journal after hearing a classmate read her autobiographical essay:
Sitting in class listening to Jennifer's autobiography was quite an experience
for me. I have never had and can't imagine ever having the strength to look
at my own personality that deeply. It wasn't sentence structure or excellent
vocabulary which made me think so hard about what she wrote. It was the way
she actually showed herself and made it clear what she thought of herself in
relation to that part of the world which touched her. Our society has me so
deeply trained to show only certain sides of myself that I sometimes doubt the
existence of any other side. Somehow Jennifer is able to look not through
society's eyes, and this made her autobiography have real meaning.
For this student writer and for autobiographer Wallace Fowlie, "Writing is
indeed a process of self-alteration. Living belongs to the past. Writing is the
present" (275).
This making of writing into a historical present happens in a number of
ways. For example, what's especially striking about writing autobiography,
with its reliance on memory, is that it enables the recovery of the voice's
originating oral power through the process of privileging the author. Autobiograph y offers us the only prose situation in which writing and speaking jostle
each other for equal space and attention in their interdependence, as writers
assume roles and identities in relation to others and their worlds and as they
explore what Sidonie Smith refers to as "communal figures of selfhood, those
intertexts that shape the autobiographer's self-interpretation" (45). In
writing autobiography, we hold conversations with ourselves to reconstruct
and to mediate a present identity from the memories that emerge. We contain
our pasts in language through the sounds of our voices. As we fashion our own
voices within and against the voices of self and others in our culture and
immediate lives, we create ourselves, as Karen LeFevre puts it, "by means of
inner conversations carried on with internalized others" (93). As Patricia
Rampl says, "You tell me your story, I'll tell you my story" ("Memory"
1011). By making ourselves public, we engage in an important exchange of
knowledge.
Thus, writing autobiography can offer mature student writers a unique
experience in textuality as an exercise of critical consciousness. Since
autobiography makes us listen carefully to ourselves as writers speaking
while writing, the writer simultaneously becomes protagonist, narrator, and
140 Journal of Advanced Composition
author. Eudora Welty describes this subtle process as she has experienced it
through a lifetime of reading and writing:
Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never
been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice
was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any
person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is
inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.
The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in
the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but
never found out, that this is the case with all readers-to read as listeners-and
with writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The
sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for
me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know
whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.
My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the
same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of
it comes back to my ears, then I actto make my changes. I have always trusted
this voice. (11-12)
In a journal response to this passage, one student wrote that Welty •• said
something to the effect of voice being in its own tone describing itself as it
reveals the story you are reading. The voice inside your head while you read
is not your own or anyone else's that you know because it is its own unique
being within the relationship between yourself and the thing you are reading
about.' , Writing could stand alongside reading in the above sentence
because, in addition to the interplay and interdependency between writing
and speaking in autobiography, reading the emerging text of the self, as
Welty points out, becomes such a constant and integral part of the autobiographical act that voice always inserts itself there as well.
When we encourage advanced students, at this later stage in their
intellectual development, to shape and share their own experience through
writing, we encourage them to listen to themselves in the act of creating those
"shades of deeper meaning" Angelou speaks of. Autobiographer Hampl
describes such a writing act as •'the intersection of narration and reflection,
of story-telling and essay-writing. It can present its story and reflect and
consider the meaning of the story" ("Memory" 1012). As a result, when
students develop a voice they can identify as their own through its embodiment in a piece of writing that recreates their world and those voices that
inhabit that world, they are well on their way toward the empowerment that
enables them to meet the constant challenges of reading and writing their own
histories and those written by others.
One student expressed his desire for such empowerment while remembering what the late James Baldwin said to him during a campus visit in 1986:
"Voice is almost another person. It is another person. Not really so different
Writing Autobiography 141
from myself, but separate from myself is my voice. My voice is something
I yearn for. James Baldwin told Maureen Leak and me to quit looking for our
voices and they would be there." Of course, I can only speculate here, but it's
as if Baldwin is urging these students to find their voices through writing those
voices into being by engaging with and activating their worlds. Baldwin
himself always did so, especially in the intensely dialogic expression of self
in his autobiographical collections of essays such as Notes of a Native Son.
In autobiography, students get inside the act of writing so that they
become their texts-writers in the process of becoming their own rhetorical
productions. Autobiography arises from this heady confluence of self,
language, and others through dialogue. And because autobiography depends
on the "inner conversations" with the self and "internalized others" in the
process of social construction, writing autobiography can become a means to
self-knowledge that serves as a valuable adjunct to academic writing. It's not
surprising that the word "education" continues to recur in the titles of
autobiographies, from The Education ofHenry Adams to the more recent The
Hunger of Memory: The Education ofRichard Rodriguez and A Romantic
Education (Rampl). Even when the word' 'education" does not get named in
the title, the hunger to learn and to know oneself in the context of the world
drives the narrative-as Malcolm X asks, "Why am I as I am?" (150).
In answer to such naked expressions of the desire to know, Janet Varner
Gunn makes a strong case that the kind of "narrative behavior" implicit in
autobiography through speaking one's life is a "cultural or 'worldly' transaction and not simply a self-referential one"--one' 'that delves into time in
order to take up the problem of depth" (38). For example, in an autobiographical essay, another student, Amos, reflects on what his journey to a new
high school reveals about his growing awareness of what it means to be Jewish
American:
Now the teachers' roll-books were filled with all sorts of strange names.
Names that I'd heard on television, names I couldn't pronounce, and others
like Williams or Jones that I thought only people checking into hotels used.
My friends became Tardibuono, Ryan, Peruthers, Provenzano, and Maloney.
The days on the baseball field after school became a memory in a different life.
There were more than pop-flies in this new world to catch.
Amos' voice, in the act of naming others, creates itself by situating the
speaking voice in time and place: he exists in the present by referring to a past
and by inferring a future.
In this writing present, Amos enters into and activates his own education
by doing what Paulo Freire says in Pedagogy of the Oppressed students
should be encouraged to do: "to name the world and change it." Freire
continues, •'Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a
problem and requires of them a new naming. Men are not built in silence, but
142 Journal of Advanced Composition
in word, in work, in action-reflection" (76). In his more recent work, The
Politics of Education. Freire emphasizes the dialogic as the transforming
educational methodology: "Dialogue is the sign of the act of knowing" (55).
Certainly autobiographical writing, which gets students in touch with their
histories and their social processes, might be a part of an education centered
on dialogic methods of generating knowledge. Through autobiography,
Amos undergoes such a transforming self-alteration, as revealed in his
account of his last evening in Israel:
As the soo was going down over the Mediterranean. I watched a man walk the
beach as two yOoog girls. apparently his daughters. walked alongside. The
man, around thirty-five, was dressed in his reserve army ooifonn. He was
doing guard duty on the beach and his Uzi sub-machine goo hung from his
shoulder like another appendage. One daughter held his left hand and the
other, the smaller of the two, held the nozzle of his gun as the three proceeded
past us. The beauty of the sooset juxtaposed with this image and the
contradiction ofIsraellay before me to inspect as our food sizzled on the sandcovered grill.
In this same vein of gaining knowledge through reflection, here is the way
another student, Virginia, expresses her experience with writing autobiography (in an afterword to an exploration of her relationships with her father and
her step-father):
Autobiography isn't just hard-it's heart. Heart and soul. At first thought,
autobiography may seem like one of the simpler forms of nonfiction writing.
After all. you're an expert on the subject. right? And you're the only one who
is. Only you have the correct answers to the questions and only you know what
really happened when. No tough nights in the library doing research, no
poooding the proverbial pavements in search of an infonned opinion or
interview. It's all in your head.
Virginia's opening observations deserve attention. First, she recognizes
the complex intersection of the ambivalent nature of representation in
language: "heart and soul," "correct answers" to "what really happened."
The modes and meanings of representation lie deep inside the metaphorical
body of language that the writer must inscribe in order to produce the tex t that
represents herself. Virginia also notes autobiography's deceptive simplicity.
She has discovered whatSidonie Smith observes about autobiography: "This
genre, apparently so simple, so self-evident, so readily accessible to the
reader, is ultimately as complex as the subject it seeks to capture in its
representation and as various as the rhetorical expressions through which,
with the mediation oflanguage, that subjectivity reads itselfinto the world"
(3). Creating a writing identity to enable that "subjectivity" to read "itself
into the world" becomes the writer's most urgent task, and it is this process
Writing Autobiography 143
of writing an identity that moves the student from the margins of the
educational experience toward the center-toward' 'heart and souL"
Yet as Virginia goes on to describe the increasing complications she faced
in fixing memory through language during the often painful process of
writing her autobiographical essay, she reveals herself through a hard-won,
unique relationship with a language of the self that discloses the anguished
repetition of loss in her life. Here's Virginia's final observation on writing
about the precariousness of memory's relationship to imagination:
But that's autobiography. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it stinks and you
can't take it anymore and you want to throw the whole thing out the window
and go to the library and do some nice, safe research for a change. But you
can't-you're caught in autobiography, and it's the story of your life.
In these final words, Virginia recognizes the power oflanguage to appropriate
the self in ways that forever transform the interrelationships between subject
and object. Implicitly she recognizes that she is forever performing herself
in order to realize or complete herself-and it's a lifelong process.
Writing Autobiography in Advanced Composition
We need to encourage students to approach autobiographical writing as
a way to synthesize the reading and writing of words and the reading and
writing of the world, with themselves as the agents for transformation and
education as they voice themselves into being. Certain invention tools are
particularly useful for students writing autobiography, especially as they
encourage those "inner conversations" with "internalized others" to take
place as I have described earlier. One effective technique is to give students
a heuristic, a sequence of questions to stir their memories. These questions
also set into motion the multiple objects, voices, and perspectives that make
up the reality of the "I" as narrator and the narrated "I." For years I have
given students in freshman and advanced nonfiction writing classes a questionnaire to generate autobiographical material in their journals. Then they
fashion portions of that material into a shape that enters the flow of history as
a public text, learning how difficult it is to deal with "the problem of the
material not standing still long enough for you to tack it down onto the page
or the keyboard," as one student recently observed. Also, students find
themselves involved in a new kind of research, similar to what both Russell
Baker and Annie Dillard tell us about in William Zinsser's Inventing the
Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Dillard recalls, "I've learned a lot by
writing this book, not only about writing but about American history" (64),
and "I dig deeply into the exuberant heart of a child and the restless, violent
heart of an adolescent-and I was that child and I was that adolescent" (68).
Her research was both outer-directed and inner-directed. Similarly, Russell
Baker writes, "Funny things happen to you when you really start to research
144 Journal of Advanced Composition
something like this" (44). He describes how he found love letters written to
his mother during the depths of the Depression. These letters held a selfcontained and moving story of how the Depression could destroy the strongest
of men; a moving voice from the past authenticated and illuminated that
period of history in ways that Baker's own words and voice could not do as
powerfully.
We need to show students how to engage in such inner/outer research.
Here is the questionnaire I currently distribute to stimulate both inner- and
outer-directed research:
Questionnaire For Writing Autobiography'
The following questions are designed to help you explore the
implications and connections that may exist between you and
the people, places, and events that have made up your life. Since
this list only contains a few possibilities, add questions as you
go. The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with a body
of material in your journal from which you can shape a fmished
autobiographical essay. Be alert to where these questions might
lead you. Provide as much detail through descriptive language
and visual scene as you can in each question. Make the whole
stand as a rough draft.
1) What physical traits (face, hands, feet, body gestures, ways
of wa1king, ta1king, wearing clothes) do you see in yourself?
What do you identify as your pleasing/displeasing characteristics?
2) What are your main habits? Life patterns? Tastes in music,
books, movies. friends? What do these contribute to your
life?
3) Describe the major landscapes (interior and exterior) of your
life so far. the main place(s) you associate with your childhood, the place you live now. How do you respond to these?
4) Describe your mother and father. What senses and/or physical objects do you associate most strongly with each?
5) What other members of your family have had a profound
influence on you? Provide visual scenes and details of these
people. Most important person outside the family? Provide
details.
Writing Autobiography 145
Questionnaire
2
6) What is your earliest recollection? Be as detailed as possible. Other early memories? What events were most
important in passing from childhood to adulthood? Before
starting school? Elementary education, high school? Render
scenes as vividly as possible.
7) What are your major fears and how have they affected you?
Majorpleasures? Recurrent and memorable dreams? Trace
these back into childhood as far as you can.
8) What are your attitudes toward money, sex, violence,love,
family life, food, animals, and so on? How do these affect
your life?
9) What about your character and personality are you most in
conflict about and why? What do you identify as those things
that cause you to act as you do? What are your ambitions?
Obstacles?
10) What kinds ofjobs have you held and how have they affected
your ambitions, your attitudes toward people associated
with them?
11) What are your most deeply held secrets and the reasons for
them? Most cherished memories? Why you've held onto
them?
12) What are the major issues in your life? What choices are
open to you?
Impressed with what my students have accomplished in writing autobiography generated from such questions, I have experimented with asking
students to respond to their reading of literature through writing
autobiography-through the personal rather than the critical essay. In this
way, autobiography as education toward the critical consciousness merges
the concerns of both advanced composition and literature classes. The
following questionnaire provides students with an invention tool especially
geared toward a kind of reader response that enables them to structure their
reading through the filter of their own experience:
146 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
Questionnaire For Writing
Personal Responses To Llterature4
These questions are designed to help you explore the implications and
connections that may exist between the poems, short stories, novels,
nonfiction, and plays that you read and the material of your own life.
They are especially designed for the kind of experimental and wideranging thinking on paper the journal encourages. By consciously
considering works of literature within the specific story of your own
experiences ,you give yourself a larger frame of reference for structuring
a literary essay than you might otherwise allow yourself; the shape of
your life gains in significance as you measure it against the others you
read about. Write through these questions as they are appropriate to your
reading assignments so that you have a whole body of material to draw
on for a personal essay in response to one of the literary works we are
studying.
1) Is there any dominant physical trait, gesture, or feature in a character
that gives you special insight into yourselfl Of others close to you?
How does this recognition affect your response to the character? The
work?
2) Is there a character who comes close to being like you in important
ways? Describe the similarities.
3) What physical objects in your reading do you associate with yourself,
your parents, or other family members? What does their appearance
make you think about?
4) What things that you are most passionate about appear in your
reading? How does this recognition affect your response?
5) Which of your major fears do you also fmd in literary characters?
What inhibitions or desires?
6) What patterns or events or motivations in your own life are reflected
in the literature you are reading? What similarities and/or differences are there in the events selected?
7) Which place or setting (interior,landscape, street, building) in your
reading do you identify with most and why?
8) What have you found most disturbing or disquieting (or pleasurable
and satisfying?) about what you are reading? Why?
9) What connections do you see between some aspect of political and
social life in the present and political and social life in a work written
earlier? How do you see the past affecting the present in your own
life? In the characters' lives?
10) What is your earliest memory of reading or being read to? Do you
remember the book's title? What are your favorite books and the
ones that remain most vividly a part of you? How might these earlier
reading experiences have affected your responses to literature in the
present?
Writing Autobiography 147
The resulting autobiographical essay is a natural outpouring without the
systematic ordering of ideas usually associated with literary criticism. Students combine what they think with who they are (to paraphrase Edward
Hoagland) in the process of creating a text that represents the speaking self
within the written world of the literary imagination.
One student, Charles, took full advantage of the intersection of memory
and imagination to develop an essay he called "Purgatory," in which he
writes his own autobiography against reading Virginia Woolfs A Room 0/
One's Own and Dante's Divine Comedy. He examines his relationships with
and attitudes toward women through his responses to the constant sound of
Woolf s voice. The autobiographical essay takes on the shape of a dialogue
between aspiring male writer and authoritative female author-a kind of
lesson of the master as mistress, with Charles in the role of Dante, Woolf in
the role of Virgil:
Virginia Woolf, with her casual yet firm voice, seemed to be offering her hand
to anyone who was willing to undertake the journey. Convinced I would not
reach the end without her as my guide, I took hold of her hand. Mine was
sweaty.
No sooner had we begun than Virginia asserted, "Fiction here is likely to
contain more truth than fact. . . . I need not say what I am about to describe
has no existence. "
!squeezed her hand tighter-no existence-for she deemed the earth below
my feet to be imaginary, and it sank away. Before my vertigo subsided,I found
we were walking along the venerable turf of Oxford University surrounded by
its ancient buildings, sacred churches, and revered libraries-this was something of a comfort.
In this excerpt, we can see how this student makes use of the imagined
experience to mingle with details of his reality and the language of Woolf's
text to organize meaning into a text of his own, spoken in a voice recognizably
his but suffused with his immersion in culture's relationships to language and
how both inform selfhood. This writer has mingled the details of his memory
with the stories told by others-in his voice and their-confirming the educational value of what Hampl insists on when we engage in such an autobiographical inscription of the self:
There may be no more pressing intellectual need in our culture than for people
to become sophisticated about the function of memory. The political
implications of the loss of memory are obvious. The authority of memory is
a personal conflrmation of selfuood. To write one's life is to live it twice, and
the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep
within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and also grasps the life-ofthe-times as no political treatise can. ("Memory" 1014)
148 Journal 0/ Advanced Composition
Creating a voice of one's own from voices one has known in autobiography and thereby tracing one's presence in "its narrative form" means that we
must identify and grapple with the many relationships that exist between the
self and others, and how others, in turn, affect the development of the
emerging self. Our voices must mingle with the multiple voices of our culture
to write the history of our time.
The heuristics for generating autobiographical material help to identify
the developing self as a vital part of the social contexts implicated in family,
friends, education, and work. These questions also stimulate ways to satisfy
what Rampl calls "a hunger for the world" which "in the act of remembering, the personal environment expands, resonates beyond itself, beyond its
'subject,' into the endless and tragic recollection that is history" ("Education" 5). Indeed, the autobiographical act engages the writer in a discourse
that is distinctly social, and does so as no other formal discourse available to
our students is able to. The benefits may have profound implications for
writing and learning. Richard Rodriguez observes that his autobiography is
"a book about language." Rodriguez writes, "Language has been the great
subject of my life .... Such is the benefit oflanguage: By finding public words
to describe one's feelings, one can describe oneself to oneself" (187). I
believe that such a conscious rendering of the autobiographer's voice from
multiple perspectives can create a memorable educational experience, one
that moves students from being marginal recipients of knowledge-bound up
in the texts of others-toward becoming participants in the textual production
of self-knowledge as they speak in voices oftheir own caught in the intertextuality of the self that we call autobiography.
University o/Vermont
Burlington, Vermont
Notes
1For one of the most useful surveys of the shift from cognitivist and individualist
concerns to social constructionist and community concerns, see Bruffee. Bruffee
points out that some social constructionists even see the self as socially generated:
•'What we think of as the individual self is a construct largely community generated
and community maintained" (777).
2For explorations of the relationships among knowledge, language, and self, see
Bakhtin and Bruner. Also, Freire continues to erase the boundaries between learner
and learning through his dialogic methodology.
3This is a revised version of the heuristic presented in Dickerson 117-18.
4This questionnaire is a revised version of one originally published in leFevre and
Dickerson 175-80.
Writing Autobiography 149
Works Cited
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam, 1971.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. The DialogicImagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael HolquisL Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority ofKnowledge: A Bibliographical Essay." College English 48 (1986): 773-90.
Bruner, Jerome.• 'Research Currents: Life as Narrative." Language A rts 65 (1988):
574-83.
Dickerson, Mary Jane. "Writing Personal Essays." Reading, Writing, and the Study
ofLiterature. Eels. Arthur Biddle and Toby Fulwiler. New York: Random,1989.
Fowlie, Wallace. "On Writing Autobiography." The Southern Review. 22 (1986):
273-79.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970.
-. The Politics ofEducation: Culture, Power, and Liberation. South Hadley, MA:
Bergin,1985.
Freire, Paulo, withIraShor. A Pedagogy For Liberation: Dialogues OnTransforming
Education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin, 1987.
Gornick, Vivian. Fierce Attachments. New York: Simon, 1987.
Gunn, Janet Varner. Autobiography: Toward a Poetics ofExperience. Philadelphia:
U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.
Hampl, Patricia. A Romantic Education. Boston: Houghton, 1981.
- . "Memory and Imagination." The Dolphin Read£r. Ed. Douglas Hunt. Boston:
Houghton, 1986. 1003-1014.
LeFevre,KarenBurke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
1987.
leFevre, Karen Burke, and Mary Jane Dickerson. Until I See What I Say: Teaching
Writing in all Disciplines. Burlington, VT: IDC Publications, 1982. 175-80.
Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Writes the Book." The New
York Times Book Review. (January 22,1989): 1,35-37.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger ofMemory: The Education ofRichard Rodriguez. New
York: Bantam, 1983.
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics ofWomen' s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions
of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Wadlington, Warwick. Reading Faulknerian Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
Welty, Eudora. One Writer's Beginnings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
150 Journal of Advanced Composition
Wright. Richard. Black Boy. New York: NAL.19S1.
X, Malcolm. with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York:
Ballantine. 1973.
Zinsser, William. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston:
Houghton. 1987.
M.A. and Ph.D. in English with Specialization in Rhetoric and
Composition
The University of South Florida offers a specialization in rhetoric and
composition at both the M.A. and Ph.D levels. Students can choose this
specialization to prepare themselves to conduct research into rhetorical
history, theory. and practice, and to teach composition and literature at the
college and secondary levels.
This program allows students to study the history and philosophy of rhetoric,
the theory of composition. composition research and its design. the teaching
of writing and literature. the theory and practice of stylistic analysis. and the
administration of writing programs. Students also study traditional British
and American literature and critical theory.
Teaching assistantships. tuition waivers. and other kinds of fmancial aid are
available. For further information. call or
write: Professor Sara M. Deats; Director of Graduate Study; English Department; University of South Florida; Tampa. FL 33620; (813) 974-2421.