JAC Volume 9

“Shades of Deeper Meaning”: On Writing Autobiography

Mary Jane Dickerson

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 self­-imposed 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 girl’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 sounding­ out 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 of language 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 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 intricate 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 global levels.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's recent 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 performances 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 self-defensive 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 forms 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 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 self-narrative 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 world-making 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: A Memoir, 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, and what goes on in the writer’s culture. The element of performance 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 terms 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 of itself 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/word-making 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. (I)

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 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 self and 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. Autobiography 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 Hampl 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 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 act to 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 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 of Henry Adams to the more recent The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and A Romantic Education (Hampl). 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 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 sun was going down over the Mediterranean, I watched a man walk the beach as two young girls, apparently his daughters, walked alongside. The man, around thirty-five, was dressed in his reserve army uniform. He was doing guard duty on the beach and his Uzi sub-machine gun 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 sunset juxtaposed with this image and the contradiction of Israel lay before me to inspect as our food sizzled on the sand-covered 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 pounding the proverbial pavements in search of an informed 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 text that represents herself. Virginia also notes autobiography’s deceptive simplicity. She has discovered what Sidonie 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 of language, that subjectivity reads itself into 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 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 of language 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 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 self-contained 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 Autobiography3

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 finished 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 walking, talking, 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.
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? Major pleasures? 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 of jobs 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:

Questionnaire For Writing

Personal Responses To Literature4

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 wide-ranging 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 yourself? 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 find 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?

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 Woolf’s A Room of 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.”

I 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 confirmation of selfhood. 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)

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 Hampl 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 of language: 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 of their own caught in the intertextuality of the self that we call autobiography.

University of 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 Brinier. 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.
Works Cited
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam, 1971.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. The Dialogic Imagination: FourEssays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay.” College English 48 (1986): 773-90.
Bruner, Jerome. “Research Currents: Life as Narrative.” Language Arts 65 (1988): 574-83.
Dickerson, Mary Jane. “Writing Personal Essays.” Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature. Eds. Arthur Biddle and Toby Fulwiler. New York: Random, 1989.
Fowlie, Wallace. “On Writing Autobiography.” The Southern Review. 22 (1986): 273-79.
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