The Autobiographical

Much of writing is a drawing from within, an autobiographical impulse. Autoethnography is simply a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context. readers of this column will get insights into the field of autobiography.

The standard model of the personal memoir, the autobiography, supports liberal-individualist ideology and tends to isolate the author-subject from community. Works by women and/or members of historically oppressed groups often resist the hegemony of the individualist account and give more weight to the social formation or inscription of selfhood and to the ways in which the author-subject negotiates the terms of her insertion into the identity-categories her culture imposes on her.

Where the representation of cultures is concerned, critics commend autoethnography’s intricate interplay of the introspective personal engagement expected of an autobiography and the self-effacement expected of ethnography’s cultural descriptions. The impulse for self-documentation and the reproduction of images of the self pervade our everyday practice. The common business of social existence is the occasion for endlessly resourceful and enlightened dramatizations of self. We are each in our own way articulate exegetes of the politics of selfhood.-Ron Price with thanks to James Buzard, “On Auto-Ethnographic Authority,” The Yale Journal of Criticism
Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2003
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The above paragraphs provide, I hope, a tantalizing taste of what I am on about here._________________

Slowly one comes to understand some of the meaning and the secret intent of one’s personal myth, as Jung called the inner core of one’s life. One must be conscious of underlying and often unconscious tendencies to invent the story of one’s life, so that the reality will defy doubt. Seizing the authentic story of our lives may be our essential goal and aim, particularly if we are trying to tell the tale in an autobiography. That might be how the psychoanalytically oriented theorists could put the process.



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