Scholarship on Memoirs and Personal Essays
This selective bibliography is, by no means, comprehensive--just interesting and informative resources.
Banks, William P. "Written through the Body: Disruptions and "Personal" Writing." College English 66.1 (2003): 21-40.
Banks' essay is an example of the creative nonfiction that he is discussing in the article. Because the article is a meta-text, readers can experience the exhilaration/frustration/irritation of active engagement in contemporary personal writing. He believes that writers should reveal their sense of self as they discuss the social implications of their topic. The important point is that what authors are writing deal with their personal truths, but with consideration of the truths that others are experiencing. It can't be self-absorbed, in other words.
Bishop, Wendy. "Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-ends Composition." College English 65.3 (2003): 257-275.
Wendy Bishop writes a creative nonfiction essay to discuss the tussle between nonfiction and composition curricula. She concludes, "We need to get serious about creating new, fused pedagogies, ones that include rhetoric, composition, creative writing, and literature as partners in instruction."
Bloom, Lynn Z. "Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction." College English 65.3 (2003): 276-289.
Using her own intriguing story of the twin who survived, Lynn Z. Bloom explores the ethics of creative nonfiction. As complicated as her own birth record, this discussion of ethics is complex but clearly presented. Bloom lays out the ethical questions surrounding memoir writing by scrutinizing truth/Truth in terms of her own story as well as in terms of the critical thinking of others. Especially relevant in a post-James Frey environment, this article is must reading for both writers and instructors of creative nonfiction.
Bradley, William. "Opinion: The Ethical Exhibitionist's Agenda: Honesty and Fairness in Creative Nonfiction." College English 70.2 (2007): 202-211.
Honesty in memoir writing is Bradley's interest in this opinion piece. His discussion of truth and the distinction between creative nonfiction and traditional academic writing is clear and easy to understand. He bring in the James Frey incident, and ends up emphasizing that, while imagination is valuable, "memory...is till the most valuable tool..."(209).
Brandt, Deborah, et al. "The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain." College English 64.1 (2001): 41-62.
Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard Miller, Victor Villenueva, Min-Zhan Lu, and Gesa Kirsch participate in a discussion of the politics of academics using personal writing. They bring up how and why they use the personal--or not--and the consequences of doing so--or not. Min-Zhan Lu's comments summarize participants' observations well. This is a valuable discussion for the range of issues it covers.
Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 2002.
This very readable book discusses findings of a longitudinal study of student writing at Pepperdine University. While it does not deal directly with memoir writing, it does discuss personal writing as one of the several literacy tasks students experience as they writing through college. I have blogged about this topic at Is FYC worth it? and Improving First Year Composition.
Danielewicz, Jane. "Personal Genres, Public Voices." College Composition and Communication 59.3 (2008): 420-450.
I discuss this valuable article at my blog: the entry title is Diverse First Year Composition. She is especially successful and making the reader/writer connection, which is so important to current views of successful personal essay writing.
Elbow, Peter. "Reconsiderations: Voice in Writing Again." College English 70.2 (2007): 168-188.
Elbow encourages English professionals to reconsider voice. Specifically, he is interested in a both/and approach that considers voice, on the one hand, through a full range of the senses and, on the other, voice in the native, by focusing on the text only.
Eldred, Janet Carey. Review. "Worldly Selves: The Generic Potential of Creative Nonfiction." College English 66.1 (2003): 93-104.
The over-arching issue of this review is how to retain focus on the social in academic writing while recognizing the value of expressivism? In this review, Eldred discusses two scholarly memoirs: Zohreh T. Sullivan's Exiled Memories and Min-Zhan Lu's Shanghai Quartet. From these, she moves to the theoretical in Personal Effects, which calls for personal writing anchored in a social context.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. "Revealing Silence: Rethinking Personal Writing." College Composition and Communication 53.2 (2001): 203-223.
Anyone who has taught undergraduates has experienced the students who "share too much"--who aren't selective rhetorically, morally, or socially about what they disclose. Gere examines this phenomenon from a rhetorical perspective. I discuss this thought-provoking article at my blog: the entry title is Silence. In my blog entry, I'm interested not only in what not to disclose--and why--but also how and when NOT to be silenced.
Goldthwaite, Melissa A. "Confessionals." College English 66.1 (2003): 55-73.
A confessional is writing that opens reflection and conversation, according to Goldthwaite. In substantial detail, she considers this sub-genre of personal writing and readers' responses to it. She argues that it is important to think about the genre because some use it to justify criticism of personal writing, with the result that compositionists are pictured as less rigorous than English specialists.
Haefner, Joel. "Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay." College English 54.2 (1992): 127-137.
Haefner argues that we should balance assumptions that the essay is individualistic and democratic with the reality that it can also be social and collaborative, depending on the use we make of it in our teaching. He emphasizes that, far from being formless as some argue, it has a variety of forms as a result of the various forums in which it is now published. That fact, in turn, means that it has a variety of audiences.
Heilker, Paul. "Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts." College Composition and Communication 58.2 (2006): 218-212.
As many of these writers do, Heilker writes in the genre he is discussing. He is concerned that there doesn't seem to be room in composition for the personal essay. We should not consider the essay and the thesis-driven article mutually exclusive. He cautions that we are trying to do too much under the composition umbrella; instead, we should expand composition beyond the first year in order to give room to the personal, he argues. Doing so is important not only for the students but also for harmony within composition.
Hesse, Douglas. "The Place of Creative Nonfiction." College English 65.3 (2003): 237-241.
Creative nonfiction is an anomaly, in large part because of the clash between its form and function. Creative nonfiction bridges the divide between creative wiriting and literary studies, with creative nonfiction's attributes serving as the bridge.
Hindman, Jane E. "Making Writing Matter: Using "the Personal" to Recover[y] and Essential[ist] Tension in Academic Discourse." College English 64.1 (2001): 88-108.
This article is an effective anchor to the Special Focus: Personal Writing because it models the use of the personal in academic writing as Hindman discusses her personal struggle with using the personal in the academic. In the process she models the experimental structures that are a hallmark of creative nonfiction.
Hindman, Jane E. "Thoughts on Reading "the Personal": Toward a Discursive Ethics of professional Critical Literacy." College English 66.1 (2003): 9-20.
Hindman advocates a personal writing that is "constructed for readers" with consideration of the context. For the personal writing to be effective, she emphasizes that the readers must be engaged to interpret and make meaning. This role of the reader seems to be what sets academically viable personal writing apart from the traditional expressivist paper.
Kill, Melanie. "Acknowledging the Rough Edges of Resistance: Negotiation of Identities for First-Year Composition." College Composition and Commmunication. 58.2 (2006): 213-235.
This article is steeped in academic jargon, but its point is germane to the discussion of the value of personal writing, in that the author argues that school writing is restrictive--limiting is her term--and that students would benefit by being able to draw on their innate skills and knowledge. Kill discusses the value of starting with the personal essay in first year composition in order to tie in to students' "purposes and motivations...." She emphasizes that students may limit themselves to what the school dictates only if instructors and institutions create those limitations (219).
Malinowitz, Harriet. "Business, Pleasure, and the Personal Essay." College English 65.3 (2003): 305-322.
Both Malinowitz and Bloom rely on autobiography to make their points, but the structures they use are worth comparing. Personally, I was more engaged with Bloom's periodic incorporation of autobiography snippets because their connections were pretty obvious. Malinowitz's story was interesting, but I came away feeling that I was reading a segmented essay, actually multiple essays tied together. Perhaps that's what Malinowitz wanted.
Her final section deals overtly with the personal essay. Here, she presents some basics about the form: that "language and style...are as crucially important as are logic and subject matter" (317); that academics tend to analyze the form while creative nonfiction writers celebrate it (318); and that personal essays tend to focus more on the process of learning a lesson than on teaching one, as is the case with academic argumentation (319). Finally, Malinowitz articulates precisely why the personal essay should be valued in academia: "The personal essay is an art form that may help to resolve the conflicts within many of us--students and faculty alike--who mourn the strange fact that, by choosing lives in the English department, we have to give up language in order to have it, that we have to cease creating literature in order to interpret and discuss it" (321).
Nichols, Laura. "Giving Students a Voice: Learning Through Autobiography." The NEA Higher Education Journal 19.2 (2004): 37-50.
Nichols looks at autobiography as a sociologist. When students use class concepts to write their autobiographies, they learn those concepts well. Because there are few undergraduate instances of these sorts of stories, especially for first-generation students, her students wrote and published theirs. From these, she learned about the "limitations inherent in our educational systems" when dealing with the needs of these first-generation students.
Robillard, Amy E. "It's Time for Class: Toward a More Complex Pedagogy of Narrative." College English 66.1 (2003): 74-92.
Narrative, analyses, and argument can interact with each other, Robillard points out. Narrative involves selection and interpretation, so we can think of narrative as analysis. She says, "We understand our present by interpreting our past, analyzing its details and selecting the plot line." Narrative does the work of the academy--in disguise, she says.
Root, Robert L. "Naming Nonfiction (a Polytych)." College English 65.3 (2003): 242-256.
The article attempts to define nonfiction and situate it within the field of composition. Like so many others, he does not think essayistic writing and composition have to be exclusive. In fact, he thinks that when we name "composition" we are naming "nonfiction" as well.
Root, Robert L., Jr., and Michael Steinberg. The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2001.
This textbook offers a valuable initial look at the various aspects of creative nonfiction. The primary organizational scheme is writing creative nonfiction, discussing it, and composing it. I found the alternative scheme more useful. The section, Forms of Creative Nonfiction, lists 12 entries under Memoir, and Processes and Criticism lists 6 entries (some of which duplicate the previous section). Yet another scheme lists the following under Memoir: Writers on Their Work (10 entries by 5 authors); Further Examples of the Form (5 entries); and Further Discussion of the Form (3 entries). In addition, this collection allows readers to compare types of nonfiction--the memoir with the personal essay, for example.
Spellmeyer, Kurt. "A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy." College English 51.3 (1989): 262-276.
Spellmeyer is concerned that the rise in interest in social constructionist practices (focus on discourse communities and WAC, for example) undermines that attention to the essay in composition, especially Freshman Comp. He argues that the First Year experience should focus less on forms than on the "writer's situatedness." This article advocates achieving understanding rather than merely demonstrating it.
Spigelman, Candace. "Argument and Evidence in the Case of the Personal." College English 64.1 (2001): 63-87.
This article is valuable because Spigelman reviews the arguments regarding the relationship of personal writing with academic work. She contends that narratives "can accomplish serious scholarly work" (64); in fact, they can function as arguments. To be effective, though, there needs to be "standards of judgment for narrative inquiry" (64).
Sullivan, Patricia A. "Composing Culture: A Place for the Personal." College English 66.1 (2003): 41-54.
This article complements Carroll's book in that both are interested in respecting the literacies students bring with them to class. Sullivan is interested in a rhetoric that moves beyond a bifurcation of academic and personal writing. In the article analyzes her students' personal writing to see what can be learned. She thinks of "their writing as ongoing cultural and constitutive teachings not only for one another but for us as well."
Willard-Traub, Margaret K. "Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre." College English 65.5 (2003): 511-525.
Using scholarly memoirs, Margaret K. Willard-Traub lays out "how to theorize the use of the autobiographical in the teaching of (academic) writing...." She concludes that the value of such writing is that students' "voices shape themselves in response to the changing world around them, and to the voices of others sounding within the world."
Williams, Bronwyn T. " Never Let the Truth Stand in the Way of a Good Story: A Work for Three Voices." College English 65.3 (2003): 290-304.
"Truth" and "story" are scrutinized through three lenses in this article--the journalist's, the writer's, and the teacher's. While Williams's discussion of "truth" is a valuable complement to Bloom's, even more important is his emphasis on the need to consider the power of the creative nonfiction wirter, to to keep in mind the consequences for others of that power.