Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation

Carolyn A. Barros. Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998. 248 pp. ISBN 0-472-10786-0, $42.50.

In Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation, Carolyn A. Barros presents a workmanlike and ultimately enlightening rhetorical study of the narratives that result when someone tells someone else that "something happened to me." To her credit, Barros is one of a growing number of theorists specializing in nonfictional narrative who no longer are content merely to collapse the traditional boundaries of fact and fiction. For much of the past two decades, studies have tended to attack the premise and historicity of life writing-what Barros calls "deconstruct[ing] autobiography out of existence" (2). These scholars, sometimes insightfully, have focused on the many ways that biographical texts resemble fictional texts in their creation and representation (even their erasure) of the self. Yet Barros, an associate professor of English and director of the honors program at the University of Texas at Arlington, remains fascinated about what accounts for the power of biographical and autobiographical writing, those texts that dare to reach outside their boundaries and make claims on the histories of actual people. She and other recent critics, therefore, seem to be taking a second look at biography, not to fix any permanent generic boundaries around life writing, but to describe as carefully as possible some of the most interesting ways these texts work.

The key to autobiography for Barros, as the title of her study implies, is transformation. "The inscribed me of the narrative must come into some kind of conflict with the culture and its values and laws if there is to be a transformation to narrative-a something happened worth telling," asserts Barros (6). During the course of her book, Barros reads Victorian-era autobiographical narratives by John Henry Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Margaret Oliphant. Her approach is unapologetically functional and rhetorical; she considers the narrative as a transaction between a speaker and a hearer which aims primarily to influence the hearer. In that rhetorical transaction, which she first outlined in a 1992 essay published in this journal, she wants to explain the "who" of the narrative assertion, which she terms the persona; the type of transformation, which she calls its figura; and the motive for transformation,...