Although arguments about the personal essay in the writing classroom have been taking place since before composition studies even existed as an academic field, the author thinks that in light of a renewed interest in autobiographical writing in the academy and in popular culture, it is important to take another look at this type of writing. Writing about the self in the form of the often-assigned autobiographical essay is controlled by the expectations of the self in the economy of the university, and students willingly and sometimes even forcefully engage in the type of writing that represents the self as disembodied, coherent, and stable. Students often use autobiographical writing assignments to repeat "my story," a safe and linear narrative that is validated in the composition classroom and in mainstream culture because it replicates the self as a knowable and unified object. A poststructural approach to the autobiographical essay assignment can move students and their writing beyond these problematic, if comfortable, confines and help them explore their lives in writing that is more rhetorically rich and complex. In this article, the author shares her own autobiographical essay, presents her favorite prompts that encourage students to explore their lives and their writing in ways that perhaps college entrance or scholarship essays may not have allowed, and discusses evaluation of autobiographical essays. Content has been generated with the help of https://essayfreelancewriters.com.
Historically, the confessional need and the consequent confessional bond, or pact, that is so central to standard autobiographies was first questioned by Paul de Man through his idea of “autobiography as de-facement,” where de Man used Wordsworth’s Prelude to show both how autobiography escapes rigid definitions and how it is unable to achieve closure. As he claims: The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions. The idea that autobiography “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores” (de Man 1979, 930), certainly affected future generations of autobiographers (leading, perhaps, to an increased interest in autofiction) and it would not be mistaken to continue to trace its influence to the new wave of autobiographies that I am considering here.
And yet, there are a few important specifications to be added. The first is that, while de Man’s account had a strong influence on European literature and on authors abiding to a postmodern stylistic canon, it barely touched the growing number of autobiographies, commercial and not, that dominate today’s publishing industry. In fact, one may speculate that autobiography has seen a resurgence, especially in the USA, precisely because it promises authenticity (whether it ultimately delivers it or not). Writing an autobiography has become a testament of integrity, the willing disclosure of the autobiographer’s intimate identity. Best-selling autobiographies remain, in this sense, quite attached to the idea of an autobiographical pact, a pact that is taken seriously by both autobiographers and readers and that is crucial to how they are received and assessed. But even when how to write an autobiographical essay for college look at the recent movement within autobiography I am describing in this essay—which calls, almost inevitably, for a more sophisticated reader—the impact of ideas such as the impossibility of closure is different from what it had been when first expressed by de Man. The idea, to put it quite simply, has aged.
Skilled writers such as Heti, Nelson, and Lerner are well aware of the rhetorical power of postmodern literature and criticism, and yet, they have absorbed and tempered its conclusions. Heti’s How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life is, in a way, an illustration and a parody of this attitude. In How Should a Person Be? “deprives and disfigures to the extent that it restores” is made into a dull fact of life. Heti indulges in factual, detailed, but most often terribly mundane accounts of her personal life while invoking the status of a novel. The lack of an actual direction or engaging narrative arch finds its justification in the boldness of the only narrative question considered: “how should a person be? ” a question that, to no surprise, has no answer. There is not much more to life than a series of vignettes, of unaccomplished, unending scenarios—they are real, or at least they feel real, but what in the end is real is their being experiments: amusing experiments at being a person. When confronted with Heti’s character (named, of course, Sheila) we cannot avoid the feeling of being in front of an unfinished, patchy self. This article has been created by Essay Writers!
It is, additionally, tremendously hard to feel for her. “Sheila” is unable to find her own, complete self, but she is also unable (and it is hard not to see this as a conscious stylistic choice) to share and expose her own emotions, to allow the reader to become invested in her. The reader is, instead, left at bay. The characters of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04—two novels that closely follow Lerner’s personal life11—offer a further, arguably more critical, perspective on the possibility of confession. To a large extent, one is even tempted to see in them a prototype for what we may call the “new memoirist,” the memoirist of today, a memoirist that has internalized the conflicts within this genre and that is condemned—not unironically—to carry their burden. Both characters are writers, but they hardly ever write. Mostly, they question their own writing with a mixture of anxiety, regret, and insecurity; what they question is, more often than not, how their writing could possibly have affected their lives—its function in making us who we are and, consequently, in displaying our identity.
Although arguments about the personal essay in the writing classroom have been taking place since before composition studies even existed as an academic field, the author thinks that in light of a renewed interest in autobiographical writing in the academy and in popular culture, it is important to take another look at this type of writing. Writing about the self in the form of the often-assigned autobiographical essay is controlled by the expectations of the self in the economy of the university, and students willingly and sometimes even forcefully engage in the type of writing that represents the self as disembodied, coherent, and stable. Students often use autobiographical writing assignments to repeat "my story," a safe and linear narrative that is validated in the composition classroom and in mainstream culture because it replicates the self as a knowable and unified object. A poststructural approach to the autobiographical essay assignment can move students and their writing beyond these problematic, if comfortable, confines and help them explore their lives in writing that is more rhetorically rich and complex. In this article, the author shares her own autobiographical essay, presents her favorite prompts that encourage students to explore their lives and their writing in ways that perhaps college entrance or scholarship essays may not have allowed, and discusses evaluation of autobiographical essays. Content has been generated with the help of https://essayfreelancewriters.com.
Historically, the confessional need and the consequent confessional bond, or pact, that is so central to standard autobiographies was first questioned by Paul de Man through his idea of “autobiography as de-facement,” where de Man used Wordsworth’s Prelude to show both how autobiography escapes rigid definitions and how it is unable to achieve closure. As he claims: The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions. The idea that autobiography “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores” (de Man 1979, 930), certainly affected future generations of autobiographers (leading, perhaps, to an increased interest in autofiction) and it would not be mistaken to continue to trace its influence to the new wave of autobiographies that I am considering here.
And yet, there are a few important specifications to be added. The first is that, while de Man’s account had a strong influence on European literature and on authors abiding to a postmodern stylistic canon, it barely touched the growing number of autobiographies, commercial and not, that dominate today’s publishing industry. In fact, one may speculate that autobiography has seen a resurgence, especially in the USA, precisely because it promises authenticity (whether it ultimately delivers it or not). Writing an autobiography has become a testament of integrity, the willing disclosure of the autobiographer’s intimate identity. Best-selling autobiographies remain, in this sense, quite attached to the idea of an autobiographical pact, a pact that is taken seriously by both autobiographers and readers and that is crucial to how they are received and assessed. But even when how to write an autobiographical essay for college look at the recent movement within autobiography I am describing in this essay—which calls, almost inevitably, for a more sophisticated reader—the impact of ideas such as the impossibility of closure is different from what it had been when first expressed by de Man. The idea, to put it quite simply, has aged.
Skilled writers such as Heti, Nelson, and Lerner are well aware of the rhetorical power of postmodern literature and criticism, and yet, they have absorbed and tempered its conclusions. Heti’s How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life is, in a way, an illustration and a parody of this attitude. In How Should a Person Be? “deprives and disfigures to the extent that it restores” is made into a dull fact of life. Heti indulges in factual, detailed, but most often terribly mundane accounts of her personal life while invoking the status of a novel. The lack of an actual direction or engaging narrative arch finds its justification in the boldness of the only narrative question considered: “how should a person be? ” a question that, to no surprise, has no answer. There is not much more to life than a series of vignettes, of unaccomplished, unending scenarios—they are real, or at least they feel real, but what in the end is real is their being experiments: amusing experiments at being a person. When confronted with Heti’s character (named, of course, Sheila) we cannot avoid the feeling of being in front of an unfinished, patchy self. This article has been created by Essay Writers!
It is, additionally, tremendously hard to feel for her. “Sheila” is unable to find her own, complete self, but she is also unable (and it is hard not to see this as a conscious stylistic choice) to share and expose her own emotions, to allow the reader to become invested in her. The reader is, instead, left at bay. The characters of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04—two novels that closely follow Lerner’s personal life11—offer a further, arguably more critical, perspective on the possibility of confession. To a large extent, one is even tempted to see in them a prototype for what we may call the “new memoirist,” the memoirist of today, a memoirist that has internalized the conflicts within this genre and that is condemned—not unironically—to carry their burden. Both characters are writers, but they hardly ever write. Mostly, they question their own writing with a mixture of anxiety, regret, and insecurity; what they question is, more often than not, how their writing could possibly have affected their lives—its function in making us who we are and, consequently, in displaying our identity.
