Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (review)

Abstract

Reviews Sidonie Smith and JuUa Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 526 pp. ISBN 0299 -15940-3, $65.00 cloth; ISBN 0-299-15844-6, $29.95 paper. At the April 1998 Narrative Conference, I attended a particularly stimulating roundtable discussion led by Sidonie Smith on new directions in women's autobiography. Discussants included a number of important autobiography scholars who are also contributors to Smith's and Julia Watson's most recent anthology, Women, Autobiography, Theory. These scholars discussed their new research projects, which included analyses of web sites, television talk shows, and photographs. I left this roundtable inspired by these critics' energetic and imaginative pursuits. The experience reminded me of my initial encounter with Smith's and Watson's 1992 De/Colonizing the Subject, an anthology which profoundly transformed my understandings of what women's autobiography is, and what it means to theorize about it. Pioneers of studies in women's autobiography, Smith and Watson remain at the forefront of the field. Their continuing role in producing and bringing together the most current theories of women's autobiography was evidenced not only at the Narrative Conference, but also in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, their 1996 coedited collection which, like the roundtable, demonstrates ways cultural studies is reconfiguring definitions and interpretations of autobiography. Getting a Life looks forward; Smith's and Watson's latest anthology Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (WAT) serves a different purpose. This 526-page text provides those entering the field with a clear sense of where it has been, and with the grounding necessary to enter present-day dialogue and debate. In addition to a forty-nine-page introduction, WAT includes forty essays by thirty-nine contributors, including Smith and Watson. With the exception of Hertha Wong's previously unpublished essay on Native American women's autobiography , all of the essays initially appeared in academic journals, anthologies, and single-authored books published between 1980 and 1996. Most of the essays in WAT are abridged. Influential to the study of women's autobiography, the essays are written by well-established women scholars (the majority are full professors with distinguished publishing records), most of whom work in the U.S. What most excites me about WAT is its possibilities as a teaching tool. This collection brings together many landmark essays of the past two decades. In addressing their decision to sacrifice depth for breadth, Smith and Watson explain, "We opted for a wide variety of approaches and a relatively large number of theorists in a book that would be attractive—and affordable—for classroom use" (42). In 400 Biography 22.3 (Summer 1999) thinking about the anthology's classroom use, I believe that its variety compensates for what was lost in condensing individual essays. And in some of these essays, the compressed form usefuUy eliminates explanations or analysis that, though important or even groundbreaking at the time of initial publication, today might seem predictable or unnecessary. Thus, with its abridged essays, WAT makes it easier to teach influential articles that might otherwise be passed over given the time constraints of the academic calendar. WAT will serve as an invaluable text for upper-division and graduate autobiography courses, and for those wishing to enter or survey the field of women's autobiography theory. WAT's organization provides a useful structure for an autobiography class. Essays are divided into seven sections of five to seven chapters each. Each section engages a key problematic, and as Smith and Watson state, "The essays are organized as conversations on shared topics from diverse perspectives" (42). The first two sections, "Experience and Agency" and "Subjectivities," define and problematize terms essential to the third section on "Modes and Theories," and to autobiography studies in general. The next four sections—"Histories," "Voice and Memory," "Bodies and Sexuality," and "Pontics and Pedagogy"—elaborate concerns laid out in the initial sections, and in some cases, challenge their foundational premises through foregrounding various and sometimes competing histories of women and women's autobiography. The anthology's five-part introduction, which concludes with an impressive ten-page works cited section, makes a major contribution to autobiography studies. In it...