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Autobiography and the Self—Transforming a Life into a Text

The notion of autobiography as a form of self-writing and self-creation, rather than as a simple reproduction of a life, has had tremendous implications for the genre. In the Introduction to his 1980 volume, James Olney asked a few simple questions on this aspect: “What do we mean by the self, or himself (autos)? What do we mean by life (bios)? What significance do we impute to the act of writing (graphe)—what is the significance and the effect of transforming life, or a life, into a text?” (Autobiography 6). As Peggy Whitman Prenshaw remarks in her contribution to this volume, “autobiography is not a life. It is a text, a product of memory and imagination, the effort of one storyteller to fashion a coherent plot from the episodic events that make up a life.” In other words, it is a literary work of nonfiction, not a historical account of facts in a person’s life. The confluence and influence of feminist theory and postcolonial theory during the 1980s, with its emphasis on ethnic and minority literatures, enriched critical approaches to the genre and provided new impetus to the literary analysis of autobiographical works. Since then, an impressive number of studies on autobiography have explored how a life is transformed into a text which is mediated by issues of identity, gender, race, class, performance and the body.