Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Ellen Cronan Rose This issue of jml introduces a new cover and interior design. It evokes, we think, the era of high modernism, a period jml (as the Journal of Modern Literature) was founded 35 years ago to celebrate and study. We like the old (is it a Royal?) typewriter—one that Virginia Woolf might have used in the afternoon to transcribe what she had written by hand in the morning when she drafted her novels and essays. We, editors selected in 2002 to replace our 20th-century predecessors, also like the crisp, functional sans serif font on both the cover and the interior of (dare we call it?) the 21st-century version of jml. Having indulged myself (and not bored you, I hope) with the rationale behind the new look of jml, I had better get on with introducing the contents of this special issue of the journal, devoted to autobiography and memoir. In 1993, at Drexel University, I taught a course called "Women's Autobiographies: Discovering/Inventing a Self" under the rubric of our upper division Women and Literature elective. That I was able to offer a course on that subject, with that subtitle, was owing to the work over the preceding decade of feminist scholars,1 building on deconstructionist and post-structuralist continental theory, who challenged the then-regnant theory that autobiography told the story of an exemplary great man, whose name signed to the manuscript attested to the truth of the story told therein, constituting an "autobiographical pact" between the writer and the reader (Lejeune 14). In the decade since I taught that course, both autobiographies and memoirs and scholarship on them have continued to proliferate, and this special issue of jml invites you to sample the work of a new generation of scholars who advance into the 21st century the post-structuralist challenge feminists issued at the end of the 20th century to understandings of autobiography shaped in the 1960s and 1970s by Georg Gusdorf, Philippe Lejeune, James Olney, and a few others. [End Page v] In particular, the first five essays in this issue of jml, although each focuses on a particular author and/or text(s), stake out new territory for autobiographical theory. Kalliopi Nikolopoulou reads James's classic tale, The Turn of the Screw, through the lens of autobiographical writing to show how James appropriates and deconstructs certain assumptions of the genre, thus anticipating and performing contemporary theorizations of autobiography. In Le grand incendie de Londres, the contemporary French poet and scholar Jacques Roubaud focuses on the destructive aspects of the relationship between writing and memory. By reading bodily metaphors of trace-making in this multi-volume work, Aleka Calsoyas shows that Roubaud's notion of the relationship between memory and writing both recalls and complicates the concept of the "trace" that Derrida develops through his reading of Freud. Despite many references in Beckett's texts that would seem to require autobiographical interpretation, Sarah Gendron suggests that his work is instead an exploration of the very notion of the self and its relation to writing. Thus, as she shows, his work enters into dialogue with postmodern theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, who render problematic the relationship of writing to the written subject. Chloë Taylor Merleau presents a very strong case that her essay is not so much a study of Annie Ernaux (although it is that, too) but rather a groundbreaking examination of what Merleau calls "the confessional aspect of modern subjectivity." Finally, Janet Galligani Casey discusses one of the many popular women's magazines published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In The Farmer's Wife, a new form of self-narrative emerged in letters to the editor, in which women offered opinions on a variety of social issues and frequently shared their personal experiences. These letters, Casey shows, broaden the terrain of what we consider autobiographical discourse. Turning our attention to the body of autobiographical scholarship and criticism that has proliferated since Jane Tompkins published "Me and My Shadow" in New Literary History in 1987, Laurie McMillan demonstrates how Alice Walker incorporates performative elements into her autobiographical criticism, thus...