Speaking Volumes about Auto/biography Studies in Canada

Abstract

THE TWO VOLUMES, Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions, edited by Julie Rak, and Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, demonstrate the vigour of contemporary auto/biography criticism in Canada. Published in Canada by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 2005, each book contains twelve essays by Canadian scholars, with an editorial introduction.' Although the only two authors to contribute to both collections are leading Canadian auto/biography scholar Susanna Egan and her respected younger colleague, the late Gabriele Helms, the citations and cross-references convey the sense of a lively and interactive scholarly community. While reading these essays on contemporary Canadian autobiography I attended a conference on Art and Authenticity, at which a fascinating discussion followed a paper on the recently discovered Mungo (School of Humanities, Australian National University, 2 November 2006). Traces of ancient people, men, women, and children, on the move, going about their daily life, were accidentally preserved they crossed a muddy area about twenty thousand years ago, in the form of four-hundred-and-fifty fossilized human footprints in the remote Lake Mungo region of Australia. Yet an art historian pointed out, the footprints are of a quite different order to ancient handprints on the walls of caves in Australia and elsewhere, where the hand was deliberately placed against the rock surface to make an imprint. The constitutes an act of communication with aesthetic implications, whereas the footprints are an incidental, though extraordinary, capturing of passing people with a quite different purpose, travel for hunting, ceremony, or some other reason. The autobiographical act is more like the than the fossilized footprint. The question, Footprint or handprint?; was on my mind I considered these Canadian essays, many which owe a strong debt to the collection edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses ofAutobiography (1996). Smith and Watson themselves introduce the image of the fingerprint to indicate the vast possibilities of their project, without making a clear distinction between the print an accidental by-product of an individual going about daily life and the deliberate mark that an individual chooses to make upon a surface: We could have included discussions of bumper sticker subjects, of identity clothing, of hair. Once we got started on this project, almost everything presented itself implicated in the choosing, imposing, evading, or negotiating of an identity. Fingerprints were everywhere (18). Autobiography in Canada, edited by Julie Rak, examines how the field of auto/biography is developing specifically in Canada, discussing Canadian auto/biography only, whereas the essays in Tracing the Autobiographical range well beyond Canada's borders to consider life-writing from Palestine/Israel, works by Australian Aboriginal writers, and gypsy Holocaust texts, well emerging forms of life-writing on the internet. The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical all represent the work of female academics identifying feminist scholars. In introducing the essays in Autobiography in Canada, Julie Rak also gives prominence to feminist scholarship in autobiography criticism, although the critical perspective is somewhat broader and essayists include both male and female scholars. Rak leans more toward a footprint than a handprint conception of autobiography in that she sees more potential in cultural than in literary studies for productive development in Canadian autobiography studies. She also advocates continuing work in feminist autobiography criticism, work on trauma and culture, and on non-literary and mass-marketed texts. Rak sees the study of non-fiction discourse in auto/biography criticism as an effective way to engage with ideas about truth, representation and power in a broader social sense. …