Autobiographical Essay Research Articles

The Question of Hypodescent: An Autobiographical Theological Reflection

This autobiographical essay explores the personal experiences of the author and how he has navigated expectations and stereotypes of being Asian American working in a Roman Catholic tradition. Being the only practicing Asian American priest in his Catholic order, the Servites, this first-person account addresses structural racism and what a theological response to it might be like.

Anthony G. Hopwood: Academic Iconoclast and Entrepreneur 1944–2010

A nthony Hopwood was born on May 18, 1944 in Stoke-on-Trent in England and died on May 8, 2010 in Marlow, England. He was a pioneer in behavioral accounting research. He contributed to that area with both his research and as the founding editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), the leading behavioral accounting research journal, the reason for which he likely is best well known by scholars internationally, both in and outside of accounting. He held that position for 35 years. As Zeff (2008, 3) described it, in his remarks introducing Anthony at his Hall of Fame induction:

Landscapes of loss: Moving and mourning – An autobiographical account

Abstract This reflective autobiographical essay written from an experiential perspective investigates how closely kinaesthetic, emotional and spiritual experiences can be interwoven through movement, encompassing embodied practice, intense feeling and personal ritual. As a movement artist and therapist the author explores how her personal experience of loss was embodied and expressed in a series of moments of movement that took place both in the studio and in the wider environment, in the context of her ongoing practice of non-stylized and environmental movement. It includes detailed analysis of these moments in terms of the movement and actions undertaken and the symbolic and personal significance of them as part of a broader process of grieving. It provides insight into how an embodied expression of mourning might offer a alternative to our English culturally acceptable expressions of grief, a kinaesthetic equivalence of the poetic expression of authors such as T. S. Elliot and Rainer Maria Rilke.

I messed up a lot in Year 1…and it was awesome

This autobiographical essay is a recollection of the events and mistakes which occurred when Assyria Games Studio Ltd was formed, and when its first few game titles were being developed and marketed. This studio was formed at the start of a 12-month ‘placement year’ at university, and during these months, a few games titles and similar apps were developed, either as own-IP projects, or for clients. This essay examines several issues which faced the author (and founder of Assyria Game Studio Ltd) and his fellow developers, including: the importance of team member roles and team balance; overhead and staffing costs; networking with games industry experts; setting appropriate prices for contracts and products; delegating work to other team members; work-life balance, and, the pros and cons of working for clients, and working on own-IP games projects.

Жанрове визначення твору Ґреґора фон Реццорі “Квіти у снігу”

The body of the article goes on to disclose an autobiographical essay of the major author in the German-speaking area, Gregor von Rezzori’ “Flowers in the Snow” in terms of its genre specific ambiguity.After writing hypothetical autobiographies endlessly, Rezzori dare write an apparently autobiographical novel. Critiques considered him to reach the top of the most-exciting-authors list of the German literature.However, researchers have not determined Rezzori’s Blumen im Schnee so far as an undoubtedly autobiographical book as the genre of classic autobiography. The purpose of the given academic research is to define clear boundaries of its genre model. The problem of Defining the genre becomes far more complex because of representation of ironic pathos.Ironic charades ferment and disguise its real genre format. The author’s astounding ability to arrange his thoughts with insight and poetry enables him to do so while remaining a few paces away from the threshold of historical chronicles. The Outlined perspective is highlighted by the methodological framework of such poetological branches as time space theory and genre forms, structural and semantic hermeneutics-receptive areas of a present day history of literature, and the works of foreign adepts of Rezzori’s works.Taking into account the receptive capacity of the work, it can be determined in the sense of connotations of its genre parameters. The findings lie in the idea that Rezzori’s conventional autobiographical novel appears equally as education novel and might be considered as a synthesis of the two genres subtypes. Firstly, individuality establishing occurs in the biographical time, passing through the unique individual stages.Secondly, a personality self-making is portrayed in close connection with the historical development, it is a historical reality. Noteworthy, the text balancing on the verge of several varieties of genre should be considered as the author’s attempt to find a balance, so its composing is a main obvious “auto-therapeutic” purpose.

The Land of Allium: an exploration into the magic of place

Magical. A common adjective used to describe places. But does the magic of place spring from genius loci? Or could it be that we are the magicians, casting spells to transform places into what we desire (or what we fear)? Our sense of place is not a mirror on reality. We come to know places by inscribing our fantasies atop them, by writing onto the landscape our own imagined geographies. C.S. Lewis provides an intriguing glimpse into sense of place through the Pevensie children and their experience in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a mere wardrobe becomes a complex fantasy world in which the children play and interact. As adults, and as societies, we take real geographies and treat them as Lewis's wardrobe, creating Narnias in the depths of our most mundane landscapes. In this paper I explore the magic of place through an autobiographical photo essay set in a nature preserve in eastern Kansas. The stories I tell highlight in a literary and artistic way the phenomenological aspects of sense of place and the potential political import of the geographical imagination.

With Cauliflowers, Kisses and Banners: ‘community’, radical politics, embodied activity and art in the early Women's History Network (UK)

This autobiographical essay explores the experiences of an early Women's History Network (UK; WHN) activist and committee member from 1992 to 1994. After explaining her relationship with the WHN at that time, the author focuses on four key—and potentially overlookable—elements of early WHN history: ‘community’, radical politics, embodied activity and art. In subjectively discussing the interrelated elements of ‘community’ and radical politics the article explores the WHN's continuance of the democratic principles that many were applying in doing ‘people's history’ outwith the academy. The Network formally challenged the marginalisation of working-class, ethnic minority, and LGBT people. The section on embodied activity refers to the many gains aside from scholarship, when members of the Network enjoyed eating, walking, seeing, sewing and hugging in new and sisterly company. Finally, the WHN's welcome to art, as both methodology and product, is explored. The article concludes with a summary of what the author then expected the WHN to become, and how she now sees it and its future.

La Primavera

Helvetica Chimica ActaVolume 96, Issue 4 p. 545-563 Research Article La Primavera An Autobiographical Essay by Jack D. Dunitz First published: 10 April 2013 https://doi.org/10.1002/hlca.201300038Citations: 8AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume96, Issue4April 2013Pages 545-563 RelatedInformation

Korean students’ English learning motivation and demotivation through autobiographic essays : Retrospective reconstruction

Korean students’ English learning motivation and demotivation through autobiographic essays : Retrospective reconstruction

Reading and Writing the Turn-of-the-Century Egyptian Woman Intellectual

The Egyptian feminist and educator Nabawiyya Musa (1886–1951), after publishing her autobiographical essays serially from 1938 to 1942, published them as a book under the title Ta’rikhi bi-qalami (My history, by my pen). This essay analyzes the material role of literacy and the symbolic value of the pen in Musa’s memoirs in order to understand how literate women in Musa’s day were read and how they wrote to establish themselves as subjects authorized to participate in intellectual life. Confrontations with the pen reverberate throughout the memoirs, demonstrating that writing, in a context in which only men or European women were considered legitimate writers in a range of genres, creates anxiety and ambivalence. In spite of this anxiety and the limitations imposed on her by Egyptian and British colonial authorities, Musa appropriates the pen—the symbol of male power—to craft her subject position as a turn-of-the-century, female, Egyptian public intellectual.

Association Between a Medical School Admission Process Using the Multiple Mini-interview and National Licensing Examination Scores

There has been difficulty designing medical school admissions processes that provide valid measurement of candidates' nonacademic qualities. To determine whether students deemed acceptable through a revised admissions protocol using a 12-station multiple mini-interview (MMI) outperform others on the 2 parts of the Canadian national licensing examinations (Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination [MCCQE]). The MMI process requires candidates to rotate through brief sequential interviews with structured tasks and independent assessment within each interview. Cohort study comparing potential medical students who were interviewed at McMaster University using an MMI in 2004 or 2005 and accepted (whether or not they matriculated at McMaster) with those who were interviewed and rejected but gained entry elsewhere. The computer-based MCCQE part I (aimed at assessing medical knowledge and clinical decision making) can be taken on graduation from medical school; MCCQE part II (involving simulated patient interactions testing various aspects of practice) is based on the objective structured clinical examination and typically completed 16 months into postgraduate training. Interviews were granted to 1071 candidates, and those who gained entry could feasibly complete both parts of their licensure examination between May 2007 and March 2011. Scores could be matched on the examinations for 751 (part I) and 623 (part II) interviewees. Admissions decisions were made by combining z score transformations of scores assigned to autobiographical essays, grade point average, and MMI performance. Academic and nonacademic measures contributed equally to the final ranking. Scores on MCCQE part I (standardized cut-score, 390 [SD, 100]) and part II (standardized mean, 500 [SD, 100]). Candidates accepted by the admissions process had higher scores than those who were rejected for part I (mean total score, 531 [95% CI, 524-537] vs 515 [95% CI, 507-522]; P = .003) and for part II (mean total score, 563 [95% CI, 556-570] vs 544 [95% CI, 534-554]; P = .007). Among the accepted group, those who matriculated at McMaster did not outperform those who matriculated elsewhere for part I (mean total score, 524 [95% CI, 515-533] vs 546 [95% CI, 535-557]; P = .004) and for part II (mean total score, 557 [95% CI, 548-566] vs 582 [95% CI, 569-594]; P = .003). Compared with students who were rejected by an admission process that used MMI assessment, students who were accepted scored higher on Canadian national licensing examinations.

Learners, learning, learned: class, higher education, and autobiographical essays from working-class academics

In this article, we argue that the expectations, experience, and identities of academics may be just as crucial to improving the participation of students from low socio-economic status (SES) as higher education policies, admissions and marketing activities, but are routinely ignored. In particular, we observe that highly relevant, well-informed, and readily accessible accounts offered by academics from working-class backgrounds are not credited with the attention they deserve. This gap, or silence, signals a complex and poorly-understood relationship between education, knowledge and class. We assert that without addressing and better understanding this relationship, the situation is unlikely to improve, and the enrolment share of low SES students will remain shamefully low.

A Study on description of dailiness of Jakirok(긔록), an autobiographical essay of Madame of the family of PungyangCho(豊壤趙氏夫人)

A Study on description of dailiness of Jakirok(긔록), an autobiographical essay of Madame of the family of PungyangCho(豊壤趙氏夫人)

‘Genealogical Misfortunes’: Achille Mbembe's (Re-)Writing of Postcolonial Africa

In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy's lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe's status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, and the way in which he positions himself in relation to a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyobè.

The Exile Memoirs – between the Identity Discourse and the Critique of the Totalitarian Ideologies: Herta Müller's Case

Believing that “the things one has experienced disappear in time and reappear in literature”, Herta Müller, the German writer of Romanian origin, writes her narrative – the fictional as well as the memoir one – by constantly relating it to the totalitarian ideological context. In his autobiographical essays from Der König verneigt sich und tötet (2003) and Immer derselbe Schnee und immer derselbe Onkel (2011), the anamnesis focusing the personal history as part of “the great history” – both being deeply influenced by the experience of terror displayed by the “cannibal” and mnemophobic ideology – is permanently backed up by the meditation on the totalitarian mechanisms (social, psychological, ideological). The main point of interest entailed by the identity discourse – generating an exemplary history – is different from “self-edification”, pointing to the revival of “another time when I have always wondered about what is mere happening and what framing up in my own life” [Müller, 2011: 42], to the construction of a critical “meta-history” focusing the theme of mentally and behaviourally re- shaping the intellectual portrayed as “totalitarian subject.” Being more than an existential testimony, Herta Müller's autobiographical essays play a radiographic role for the period, equally interpreting a history of terror - her approach is totally justified, as the author strongly believes that the socio-cultural context mirrors the Communist past from a political and ideological perspective.

Wary Grammar: Fanny Howe's Narrative Bewilderment

Wary Grammar:Fanny Howe's Narrative Bewilderment Tiffany Eberle Kriner (bio) There is a Muslim prayer that says, "Lord, increase my bewilderment," and this prayer belongs both to me and to the strange Whoever who goes under the name of "I" in my poems—and under multiple names in my fiction—where error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story. A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. This contradiction can drive the "I" in the lyrical poem into a series of techniques that are the reverse of the usual narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest, and fame. Fanny Howe, "Bewilderment" In 2009, American poet Fanny Howe won one of literary culture's largest purses for her some 18 volumes of innovative, exploratory poetry. The $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize followed two other major awards (the Lenore Marshall and the Griffin) and may indicate that Howe, a poet who's long been at the edges of any number of literary mainstreams, has finally stepped into the current and gained the audience that her poetry has always simultaneously repelled and required. Howe has published widely in other genres too, writing autobiographical essays, prose meditations, short stories, and young-adult novels, as well a significant but less-often recognized body of literary fiction: some eleven novels. Of late, the novels have joined Howe's poetry as objects of some renewed interest. In 2006, five were revised, collected, and reissued under the title Radical Love. Oddly enough, though, the poetry prizes seem to have done the sales of her fiction little good. They were always what Howe called "failures on the marketplace" [End Page 129] ("Au Hasard"), garnering only a few (generally positive) reviews.1 In 2002, they were deemed by the author to be a "body of work" that was "finished" and they have received very little critical attention ("Au Hasard"). This lack of critical attention wouldn't be a problem for writers with more definite generic allegiances. Howe, though, has always written in the spaces between genres, making essays lyrical, poems essayistic, and, most importantly for this reading, narratives poetic and theoretical. She has written that her novels seem to be "notes for another genre" and that they have increasingly "joined [her] poems in their methods of sequencing and counting" ("Au Hasard"; Wedding Dress 6). For readers whose main interest has been Howe's poetry and creative non-fiction, Howe's novels offer a way to encounter a more fully realized version of her poetics. In particular, they allow readers to both examine and experience bewilderment, which is Howe's term for the complexity that inevitably finds people in the world—and also a term for a posture of attention responsive to that complexity. The present essay considers Howe's 1992 novel Saving History as an example of Howe's poetics of bewilderment. The novel tells the story of Felicity, a woman situated in an impossible ethical bind: she must either transport organs on the black market over the Mexico-United States border or be denied a kidney for her own desperately ill daughter. Felicity's experience of moral complexity drives her to what Howe names bewilderment, confused and diffused attentiveness to the incomprehensible and at times evil world around her. Saving History not only tells the story of a bewildered woman, though, but also creates a narrative form of bewilderment. It incorporates silence, scraps of dreamy meditation, and logical disjunction to bring the reader into sympathetic fellowship with the bewildered subject of the novel. The novel also demonstrates through narrative bewilderment Howe's assessment of the possibilities and limitations of narrative form. It is thus key to understanding Fanny Howe's path toward her mature poetic works. Bewilderment as a Theme In 'Saving History' Fanny Howe's essay "Bewilderment," collected in The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003), best describes how bewilderment operates for Howe in both content and form. In the essay, [End Page 130] Howe tells us that bewildered characters in her novels are victims who encounter a "double bind established in childhood...

Cont(r)acting Whiteness: The Language of Contagion in the Autobiographical Essays of Zitkala-Ša

Cont(r)acting Whiteness: The Language of Contagion in the Autobiographical Essays of Zitkala-Ša

The Canvas and the Page

The Canvas and the Page Brad Vice (bio) Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir. Peter Selgin. University of Iowa Press. http://www.uiowapress.org. 194 pages; paper, $19.95. Peter Selgin, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for his collection Drowning Lessons, is an accomplished storywriter, novelist, and nonfiction writer. But unlike many accomplished writers, he seems to have had no burning desire to write as a young person and found his footing in the trade late in life, and even then somewhat by default after limited successes as an artist, an actor, and a musician. It is clear from his collection of autobiographical essays, Confessions of a Left- Handed Man, that Selgin is one of those artistic types whose creative batteries are always charged, but whose ability to harness that energy came only with maturity. The key to understanding Selgin’s quirky, desultory personality, and thus the key to understanding his equally quirky, desultory memoir, comes in the final essay, “The Swimming Pool.” By the end of the book, we find Selgin divorced, alone, and living as a writer-in-residence in Middleville, Georgia (home of Flannery O’Connor). Somewhat at peace with this working solitude, Selgin feels satisfied, if not exactly happy, to rise early, write through the morning, eat simple and somewhat acetic meals of fitness bread and vegetables, and finally, walk a couple of miles to the small-town pool, “an old-fashioned cement pool. . .just rough concrete poured sometime during Prohibition.” The spare quality of the pool suits Selgin’s sense of discipline: “Without discipline there can be no deep or lasting pleasure. Maybe I feel this way because as a child I wasn’t sufficiently disciplined, and now as an adult I’m forced to make up with grim determination for that which my parents failed to give me.” If Selgin’s parents failed to give him discipline, they did not fail to give him a family worth writing about. The biographical details of Selgin’s family life read like the origins of superhero or a James Bond villain. Born a sinister twin—literally, with a dexterous look-alike brother George—and being raised by an absentminded but ingenious inventor, polymath father from Italy (a former employee of the U.S. State Department), his hot-blooded but indulgent Sophia Loren-esque mother who only speaks broken English, and his doting grandmother who speaks no English at all, it is clear from the get-go that Selgin simply had no chance at being ordinary. As residents of a WASPish small town in Connecticut (specifically selected by his father to conduct experiments in secret), Selgin’s exotic family seems alien, though also warm and loving. In the essay “Dagos in Mayberry,” the author remembers with pity the ordinary food the other ordinary children were fed by their humdrum parents: “While George and I were being weaned on diluted vino rosso, they drank cow’s milk and Kool-Aid with dinner, which they called ‘supper,’ and which would typically feature such ghastly bland items as cucumbers, and which they ate at an absurdly early hour.” In the title essay, “Confessions of a Left-Handed Man,” Selgin shows how difficult it is to get a clear picture of yourself when you are always looking in a mirror, as his brother looks exactly like him (though they are far from identical): “George and I grasped at anything we could to set ourselves apart from each other…. George took on the role of bookworm, while I in turn seized upon my left-handedness as my most distinguishing trait, in spite of my grandmother doing her best to repair what she saw at worst as a freak of nature.” Though Selgin himself rejects any idea that he is somehow biologically determined by his sinister physiognomy, Selgin has to admit that he represents all of the homespun myths about left-handers: artistic, accident-prone, sickly, depressive—“Coincidences, I’m sure.” And yet, through the course of Selgin’s childhood, sibling rivalry runs wild as Selgin attempts to outdo his brother. When George gets a girlfriend, “I made sure to get a better—anyway a prettier and...

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (review)

Reviewed by: Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out Molly Littlewood McKibbin (bio) Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, editors. Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out. Inanna. xx, 288. $24.95 DeRango-Adem and Thompson’s new collection of the artistic, autobiographical, and scholarly work of almost seventy women performs the important task of bridging the gap between late twentieth-century mixed-race writing and more contemporary work. Their text demonstrates the changes multiracial discourse has undergone and is undergoing. Other Tongues addresses the important concerns that dominated multiracial discourse in North America in the final decades of the twentieth century, which, as the contributions illustrate, are still quite relevant to the experiences of both older and younger multiracial women. Prominent recurring themes include belonging; racial inclusion and exclusion; identity formation; racism; physical appearance; the continuing prevalence of the ‘what are you/where are you from?’ question; the relationships between race, culture, and ethnicity; and the relationship of ‘colour’ to whiteness. Although some writers do not further these issues beyond what earlier collections have already done, others take them up in ways that renew older ideas with fresh perspectives. Many contributions touch on issues that are central to ongoing multiracial discourses, including gender, sexuality, class, migration, transracial adoption, single parenting, families consisting of multiracial parents, the rhetoric of ‘post-racialism,’ and the impact of Barack Obama as a public figure. As Amber Jamilla Musser argues, race is ‘all about context,’ and this collection makes a concerted effort to include work arising out of many different contexts. Through contributors from a large variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds working in a range of genres – including autobiographical essays, narrative sketches, poetry, drama, scholarly essays, and visual art (unfortunately not printed in colour) – Other Tongues offers diverse voices that explore multiracial experience in North America (a necessarily limited geographical region, as the editors acknowledge). The exclusive engagement with women’s voices is, the editors explain, the result of a commitment to the goals of women’s studies. But while Carol Camper’s preface (itself rather troubling in its uncritical adoption of conventional notions of authenticity) signals DeRango-Adem and Thompson’s debt to her 1994 collection of women’s writing, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women, and while the desire to offer a forum in which women’s voices can be heard is clear, the absence of men’s experiences is at times a notable lack. Since multiracial discourse is in many ways a product of critical race theory and, consequently, is dependent on the ‘storytelling’ of racialized individuals as a way of approaching matters of race, the absence of male contributors seems limiting. While the editors’ choice is made explicit, the collection [End Page 704] is presented in a way that suggests it is quite straightforwardly a text grappling with multiracialism that happens to include only women. Since contemporary North American multiracial theory, scholarship, and cultural production have never been dominated by men, there is no immediately apparent reason to focus on women to the exclusion of men. However, the most significant feature of the volume is that it exhibits clearly the complicated set of variables that affect the experiences and identities of racialized figures, and several of the contributions are especially insightful. The blend of contributors of different ages and from different class, educational, regional, and cultural backgrounds aids the project of multiracial discourse, which is perhaps best defined by its heterogeneity. This collection is helpful since the importance of hearing a variety of voices is essential for resisting the homogenizing process of racialization in North American society. As Jackie Wang explains, ‘I write because I believe that it means something, because I have a story, although it is not the story,’ and, indeed, the multitude of ‘stories’ in Other Tongues demonstrates the differences within ‘mixed race’ even as it identifies similarities. Although the content of the book does not really break new ground, the editors foster an unusual dialogue between their contributors that emphasizes the important links among ‘real life,’ art, politics, and the academy. A strength of the collection is that because it includes so many genres, it supplies various points of access to the complex subject...

From Anonymity to Autobiography: Mme d’Arconville’s Self-Fashionings

Over the course of a publishing career that extended from the mid-1750s to the early 1780s, Marie-Genevieve-Charlotte Darlus, presidente Thiroux d'Arconville (1720-1805), manifested exceptional intellectual range and versatility. She published literary and scientific translations, moral treatises, original scientific research, two novels, and three substantial biographies. Ali these works appeared anonymously. Despite whatever real or perceived restrictions were imposed by her sex or her class, d'Arconville published widely and enjoyed some degree of critical success for her literary efforts; her scientific and historical work received considerable recognition. As she describes it in one of her late essays, anonymity was a choice that she never regretted: J'etais tres determinee a ne jamais instruire le public de mes occupations litteraires. J'ai ete fidelle au parti que j'avais pris sur cet objet, ayant fait reflexion qu'il y avait toujours a perdre pour une femme de se declarer auteur, et tres peu a y gagner. (1) Her adherence to the code of anonymity was, however, no less steadfast than her desire to exercise control and ownership of her work. Her publication strategies were calculated to link her works without revealing her gender, creating a definable body of work attributable (by an attentive reader) to a single person. As we seek to understand the nature of authorship, particularly female authorship, in the eighteenth century, d'Arconville is a fascinating figure, not only because of the range and intensity of her intellectual commitments, but also for the two very different ways in which she exercised authorial control and expressed her identity as a writer. During the decades of her publishing career, she projected an authorial presence through the systematic paratextual interlinking of her anonymous works, as well as through her direct oversight of the production process. In her final years, however, self-expression takes another form, in a series of autobiographical essays that reveal the extent to which writing and intellectual production were at the core of her identity. Part of a large corpus of writings on a wide range of topics, the autobiographical essays offer a remarkable portrait, or series of portraits, of d'Arconville: as a young girl, thirsty for learning and books; as a busy intellectual, balancing family commitments and writing in the prime of life; as a victim of revolutionary violence; and as an old woman, melancholic and in poor health, who still takes pleasure in writing and projects. Just as her publishing career simultaneously manifests self-effacement and possessive ownership, so too her late essays bespeak both containment and self-revelation, as well as an ongoing search for the right form, or mode, in which to present her life. As a biographer and historian, she had reflected on the possibilities and pitfalls of life writing. And as longtime, careful, and frequently resisting reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she is sensitive to the appeal of personal history and drawn to the model of the Confessions, but also aware of a need to find her own way of shaping her story. The work of authorial self-construction, both over the course of her publication career and in the process of writing her life, provides a study of the options facing a woman writer in the later eighteenth century, and a personal vision of the writer's progress. At the time of d'Arconville's first publication, Avis d'un pere a sa fille (1756), a translation of Lord Halifax's Advice to a Daughter, women had long been visible on the literary scene. Eighteenth-century critics and anthologists pointed to the presence of women of letters as indicative of the advanced stage of French society. Ali underscored the beauty and importance of the writings of Madame de Sevigne, Madeleine de Scudery, Anne Dacier, and a host of others. Pons-Augustin Alletz viewed Emilie Du Chatelet's scientific expertise as bringing gloire to notre siecle (2:107). …