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The samples below are taken from a list built for a course in autobiography. In order to write my paper, it's necessary to understand the shape of existing discussions about my topic: exploring how we use auto/biographical resources in criticism.
Sample Annotated Bibliography
Abstract: Autobiography, Textuality, and Feminist Theory: Voicing the Gap
Autobiographical resources (i.e., what we think we know about a writer’s life) lie in a contested site within literary study: on the one hand, we recognize the text as an interplay between writer and reader and understand that the subject position – gender, race, class, et al – of each matters, but on the other hand, literary critics discourage a reliance on auto/biographical resources as a legitimate critical method of literary texts. In other words, the “background” of an author’s life becomes taboo once the “real” criticism begins. Of course, we cannot expect autobiographical fictions or biographical sleuthing to offer us any sort of definitive truth about a text, but I intend to ask how the auto/biographical is a larger framework for analysis that needs closer examination. Since any dismissal of auto/biographical narratives is essentially a separating of “life” and “work” – however constructed each of these categories may be – I plan to explore the position of autobiographical criticism in our discipline (both in- and out-side of autobiography studies).
I intend to look to feminist criticism and theory for a way to understand autobiography not only because I will deal with women writers, but because information about writers’ lives seems much more accepted as a critical resource in women’s studies classes and in classes with a feminist bent. Second wave feminism’s credo that “the personal is political” legitimized, for them, personal experience as a critical method, and this, I think makes room for an investigation into author’s lives and also raises questions about the relationship between gender an authorship. More recent feminist theory has, of course, complicated the simplicity of the personal equal political equation, but both biography and autobiography remain problematic even within feminism. Postmodern and poststructuralist thought has especially complicated the issue by foregrounding the inherent defects in the representational power of language….
The Mother Speaks
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
---. Three Guineas. 1938. Harcourt Brace & World, 1966.
---. Women and Writing Ed. with an introduction by
Michele Barrett. London: The Women's Press, 1979.
In these and other works, Woolf portrays the writer as a product of her historical situation and material conditions. He questions about how a writer's gender (or androgyny) influences her writing have not yet been thoroughly answered today, and her articulation of the problematics of how life and work interact is still incredibly valuable in any discussion of biography, especially women's biography.
The Fathers Write
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." The Rustle of Language.
Berkeley: U California P, 1986. 49-55.
---. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill & Wang. 1975.
Barthes' essay pronounced the death of the author, or at least the death of criticism which considers the author to be a person. Rather, he suggests, the author is born at the same time as the work, in the writing. In The Pleasure of the Text and elsewhere, though, he confesses that he (like most of us) desires the author, and acknowledges that despite his claim that such a figure does not exist, we continue to consider, in many respects, the author as person and personality.
Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald
F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 113-38.
Foucault complicates Barthes' death of the author, for while he agrees that criticism's task is not to rediscover authorial intention, he suggests that Barthes' eulogy works to reinscribe the author as genius. Rather, he announces the "author function," a complex of many discourses, discourses of language, power, institutions, sexuality, etc. which at their intersection create what we term an author.
Iser,Wolfgang. "Interaction between Text and Reader." The
Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and
Interpretation. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman and
Inge Crosman. Princeton UP: 1980. 106-19.
The father of reader response criticism sets up a text as an intersection of two influences: the author and the reader (which he also terms, respectively, the artistic and the aesthetic). While his notion of a "virtual work" may be passe, and while his intention (ha!) may have been to make room for the reader's role in creating a text, it is his assurance that the author remains in the text that makes room for biographical criticism.
Biography Within Postmodernism
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. "Postmodernism and the Biographer."
Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender. Ed. Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn
Yalom. New York: State U of New York P,
1990. 155-65.
It is precisely because, Middlebrook claims, biography seems to occupy a site safe from postmodern concerns that it urges us to ask questions about authorship, readership, and subjectivity. In her discussion of Anne Sexton in particular, Middlebrook also connects authorship with law, claiming that the author is born not only in the writing (as Barthes claims), but in the publishing of a work. While her discussion does not specifically focus on the role of gender in biographical study, she identifies both authors and subjects of biographies as "hostages to the universes of discourses that inhabit them, universes in which gender plays a crucial role.
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