Reading Autobiography, pp1-26 notes

Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson, Reading Autobiography, course reader.

I guess they're starting as they mean to go on - right in the thick of the subjectivity/representation wars. I wonder what the average consumer (and I use the word advisedly) of biography and autobiography would think of phrases like "writes her subjectivity."

The questioning of the self that is writing is obviously a very important one, but it can make your head spin, trying to figure out if you are reading what the person thinks they said, or whether you should be "reading" the subtext around how they construct their "self."

p 11: a claim that historians remove references to themselves. I know this is an academic convention, but do they do it as much as they used to? And should they? Despite the potential confusion of all this self-referentiality, I do like prejudices to be out in the open.

p19: a reference to collective remembering and augmentation of memory. This could be useful for something else I'm working on, AKA the Melways piece. (admin note: quite hard to keep the journal to just this subject's work; may have to cut and paste and chop later).

p26: How existing discourses can shape the telling of a personal story. It must be hard to resist this; the easy way is to say "I'm this sort of person" - mainly because it's easier for readers to then shortcut to your "story". Thinking about the way musicians always say they hate being classified as playing X kind of music.

An unrelated reading note: have a list somewhere of what I call personal manifestos: Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter, the letter written by the woman who shot Andy Warhol, the letter written by that French murderer we studied in philosophy class, the Unbomber's manifesto. I'm sure there are a few more. From the Latin, I suppose: manifest, to show, with the first person personal ending "O".

And the beginnings of a reading list: The chapter on historical situation of biography, and Rosenberg's East of Time. Quite pleased I now have to read it, I ordered and bought it a year ago and it's been buried under all the books acquired since. Every time I think of him, I think of something he said on the Book Show: that when all is utter darkness, the smallest chink of light can appear very very bright (or words to that effect).