Across the boundaries: Reading and resistance in contemporary American autobiography

This study explores the connections between questions of identity and choices about form in the works of several contemporary American autobiographers. In these autobiographical works, writers from diverse backgrounds and traditions (especially traditions defined by race and/or gender) use innovative forms to challenge static notions of identity that presume a Modernist, individualist self. In spite of the many local differences that separate them, these writers share a broad philosophical concern with marginality and the conditions under which resistance to externally imposed models of identity becomes possible in autobiographical writing. Recent work on collaborative autobiographical forms--especially slave narratives and American Indian autobiographies--implies that all autobiography is highly collaborative. These writers highlight collaborative aspects of autobiography as a way to challenge the limits of the traditional autobiography.;In different ways, the writers in this study use innovative forms to move across the boundaries that limit the kind of identity that may be developed in autobiography. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior shows how innovations of form may comment on the ways that multiple traditions, influences, and audiences affect the practice of autobiography. Kingston creates new combinations of narrative that disrupt and destabilize attempts to limit Chinese-American female identity to stereotypical ideas about what it means to be "Chinese," "American," and "female." Leslie Marmon Silko's mixing of white and Laguna ways of seeing in Storyteller brings contradictory worldviews into tension without canceling each other out. Gerald Vizenor's Interior Landscapes uses the traditional tribal trickster figure and a new model of the mixedblood to show how irony and disruptions of form can unseat assumptions about the self and about collective identities and begin to break down some of the limits of traditional autobiography.;In the final chapter, I show that many contemporary autobiographies and critics seek to undermine the foundations for any singular model of a separate or pure tradition of autobiography. Works by two writers separated by race, religion, geography and family traditions--Audre Lorde and Terry Tempest Williams--illustrate how boundary crossing is now an important feature of widely differing autobiographical forms and traditions.