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Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 296 pp. ISBN 0-8166-2882-3, $37.95 cloth; 0-8166-2883-1, $14.95 paper.
"Getting a life means getting a narrative, and vice versa" (80)-so say Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in their latest collaborative work of life-writing scholarship. Reading Autobiography is their fourth major joint venture, the others being Del Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography (1992), Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996), and Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998). This is a momentous event in life-writing pedagogy: here, for the first time, we have an overview of the field of "autobiography" that includes history, poetics, theory, politics, criticism, terminology, and research resources. The nearest competitor is William Spengemann's admirable but more selective The Forms of Autobiography, published in 1980. In a mere 219 pages of main text Smith and Watson cover a remarkable amount of ground. This book would be worth reading for its breadth of reference to "autobiographical" texts alone. Its bibliography of primary and secondary sources will be a major resource for life-writing scholars, teachers, and students for years to come.
The volume comprises seven main chapters. The first deals with definitional issues, then moves to theoretical topics, and in particular, "autobiography'''s relations to history, and the question of "autobiographical truth." Chapter 2, "Autobiographical Subjects," begins with an impressive, multifaceted account of "memory," then considers the nexus between "the autobiographical subject" and "experience"; it then moves to various sites and registers of "identity," a very good discussion of "embodiment," and a less satisfactory account of "agency." The third chapter, "Autobiographical Acts," provides a usefully detailed, and sometimes innovative, poetics and rhetoric of the genre. While it's particularly good on "sites" of telling, reception and representation, and modes of emplotment, its account of "modes of Self-Inquiry" is suggestive but limited in philosophical scope. Chapter 4, "Life Narrative in Historical Perspective," attempts the impossible: an historical account of "autobiography" from Augustine to now, ranging across cultures, and through canonical and marginalized voices-all in twenty-five pages. Given the awesome constraints under which they're operating, Smith and Watson do a fine job here. They're interesting on some of the canonical texts, and strong on various...