Teaching Life Writing Texts by Miriam Fuchs, Craig Howes

Abstract

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1105 All of this suggests that Children's Literature is too good a book to disappear into the deserts of series-land, and we can only hope that copies of itwill lodge in libraries everywhere to provide a sourcebook for students. And we can also hope thatGrenby recovers from the scars of reading a brief paragraph listing aca demic appointments in the north of England that appeared inThe Guardian on 15 February 2005. Itwas headed 'Harry Potter Studies', and began: A readership in children's literature? That's not going to be very hard, is it?The writing's big and there are lots of pictures. Oh, don't be facile. It's a perfectly respectable discipline and Matthew Grenby is the new reader in it atNewcastle University.' 'Such con descension', Grenby observes (with almost visible self-restraint), 'is on thewane' (p. 200). He is probably right?and books like his Children's Literature, if itgets into the righthands, can only speed the process. Cardiff University Peter Hunt Teaching LifeWriting Texts. Ed. byMiriam Fuchs and Craig Howes. New York: Modern Language Association ofAmerica. 2007. xii+400 pp. $40 (pbk $22). ISBN 978-0-87352-819-1 (pbk 978-0-87352-820-7). For both teachers and researchers in the varied areas of 'lifewriting, this volume in the Options for Teaching series is of tremendous value. It sets out to be as all-encompassing as possible in terms of itsdefinition of life writing, and thusmany readers are likely to encounter examples of various forms ofwriting the selfwhich they have not previously considered in any great detail. The text is divided into two sections?generic approaches and cultural approaches?though the editors rightlyacknowledge that this isnot a rigid division, and that there is an appropriate cross-over between the categories. Part 1 is, in turn, subdivided into two categories ('Literary Studies' and 'Interdisciplinary Approaches'), while Part 11focuses spe cifically on 'Times and Places', 'Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Approaches', 'Gendered and Sexual Orientation Approaches', and 'Illness and Disability Ap proaches'. Even these subheadings, however, only hint at the diversity of 'texts' and methods of teaching considered in some detail here. The Literary Studies section, for example, looks at diaries, travelwriting, theplace of drugs in autobiographical writ ing, and sports autobiographies, as well as grappling with theoretical issues around biography and autobiography. The section on interdisciplinary approaches includes discussions of creative writing in the classroom, the Beatles' output, the place of autobiography in art history, and sculpture as autobiography. In Part 11the usual view of autobiography as an individualistic form is repeatedly challenged through consideration of the importance of community autobiography in non-Western cultures. Gender, sexual orientation, and the experiences of trauma, illness, and disability are all considered in terms ofhow theymay best be theorized and taught. In their introduction Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes outline the phenomenal growth in interest in lifewriting in the academic context, as well as its increasing theoretical complexity, explaining this interest in terms of life writing's foreground ing of issues of identity, subjectivity,memory, agency, history, and representation, no6 Reviews and noting how all of these issues are germane to recent critical work in the areas of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, disability, the status of indigenous peoples, and postcolonial politics and aesthetics.What isalso obvious from thevarious chap ters in this book is the enormous interest that students, from those doing evening classes through undergraduates to advanced postgraduates, also have in life writing. The contributors, who teach and research inAmerica, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, and South Africa and in differing academic environments, outline their responses to thevarious challenges posed by both the structures of the institutions inwhich theywork and the experiences and expectations of the student bodies with which they engage. They show a high level of theoretical awareness of work in the field, and a very impressive teasing-out of different pedagogical approaches within the different courses taught. The purpose of the collection, its editors state, is twofold: to suggest the range and creativity of lifewriting worked on in various departments and programmes throughout theworld, and to share the experiences of their contributors as sources of encouragement for new...