Self-Narrative as Performative Act: Student Autobiographers and the Postmodern Self

Abstract

This article traces how a cohort of students enrolled in a self-narrative writing course in New York began to (reluctantly) engage with the course material, including an introduction to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's constituents of autobiographical writing, as well as their own narrative experiments and investigations and their self-reflective writing. As a result, many of them found a deeper awareness of audience – as writers and as readers through the recognition of the postmodern, linguistic self and the autobiography as a performative act. By letting go of the idea of the autobiographical self as a fixed, stable entity, they were able to write for an actual audience, in fact, allow that audience to influence how they constructed their life narratives and how they understood their lives.