The Troubled and Troubling Genre Life On-Going Writing or On-Going Life Writing

Abstract

The essay investigates recent examples of fictionalized memoirs and of false memories or misremembered traumas to theorize the new generic category of the “academic autobiography” to trouble the definitions of that category. The foundational dynamic of the imagination in all language art enterprises, particularly in self-expressive, self-reflexive, and self-constructing discourses, runs counter to the character of academic inquiry and expository communication. The memoir is an on-going project in so much as the subject-narrator-author's life is on-going and so shares common ground with the journal. Moreover, as illustrated in the instance of the author's own memoir, the autobiography, academic and otherwise, is ruled by the choice of language of utterance, and in this way is limited as to how much it can narrate of social worlds that, while experienced by the subject, lie outside of that language.