Getting Transpersonal

Abstract

This essay deploys the notion of the “transpersonal” – understood as the links to others that we establish with generations past and present – to analyze a group of memoirs from the 1990s. Centering on the plot of transformation common to U.S. academic autobiographies as they narrate their subject's individual progress from home to the university, the essay argues that academic memoirs prove to be as much about family and separation, as about the institutions of schooling that academic writers pass through on their way to a university career. This reading of memoirs by Edward Said, Alice Kaplan, Michael Awkward, Shirley Lim, and Jane Tompkins shows how the personal – the singularities of self and situation – negotiates with the transpersonal, and how the inherited categories of social identity that shape the autobiographical subject intersect, often painfully, with the rituals and requirements of the academic journey. We thus see how the cost of an academic life is calculated at the crossroads of the personal and the transpersonal, structural and historical trauma; and located in the knots that affectively tie autobiographers to readers.