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by Thomas Newkirk. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997 124 pp.
By characterizing the personal narrative as a strategic performance, Thomas Newkirk's The Performance of Self in Student Writing provides a new vantage point from which to examine the value of expressive writing in the composition classroom. According to Newkirk, students do not reveal their "true" selves on the pages of their personal essays; rather they try to construct appropriate literary versions of the self, or "subjectivities," by drawing from a repertoire of socially acceptable roles or stances. Their task as writers is "to create a self that works, that will be taken seriously" (16). Students select from a variety of literary and cultural sources, which includes their peer groups, communities, and the culture-at-large, to determine the selves they wish to enact in their writing. As such, the roles they assume may be incompatible with the selfrepresentations most valued in English departments. The Performance of Self in Student Writing invites college writing teachers to interrogate the...