Making place in Western American autobiography: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, William Kittredge, Lorena Hays, and Maxine Hong Kingston

In his memoir A Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge observes that “the way we make ourselves at home in the world is by one act of imagination after another, telling stories, naming.” The concept of home is intimately tied to the concept of identity—the stories we tell of ourselves involve complicated constructions of both self and place. In autobiography, the stories we tell of ourselves often take the form of narratives, and as Jerome Bruner points out, narrative is not just a simple retelling of events, but a way of organizing our experience. The major themes of this dissertation are the narrative construction of place and self and the ways in which the two are related. In order to demonstrate the narrative construction of self and place, I examine four western American autobiographers from different eras, ethnicities, and placed perspectives. Each autobiographer situates herself or himself within the complex myths of western American identity from different points of view. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Life among the Piutes, William Kittredge's Hole in the Sky, Lorena Hays's To the Land of Gold and Wickedness , and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior are autobiographies that reveal the perils of writing in the contact zone.;In the contact zone, place is not contained neatly on a map and identity is not housed only in the body. Neither is essentialized nor absolute, but realize their meanings as fluid, dynamic entities. In order to read the relationships between place and self, I explore the ways in which heteroglossia reveals the ongoing constructions between place and self.;By joining the fields of autobiography studies and place studies, I am able to discuss how identity is related to place. I demonstrate how autobiographical theory and place studies can be joined to create a theoretical lens through which a reader may garner new insights into the relationship between self and place.