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INTRODUCTION

Autobiography has great appeal for any mainstream culture, since it tends to reproduce the myth of the success story. Western culture employs autobiography to culturally redistribute to consumers the mythic formulas of success in society, of reaching celebrity, and acquiring a certain standing in society. Autobiography places the reader in the experience and thought of another person and, consequently, sets the reader off in a process of self-reflection that produces a contemplation of humanity. Narratives of the self are uniquely poised to affect the reader precisely because they relate an experience that is at the same time both unique and universal. There is a constant reminder of the shared experience that is involved in our existence as human beings. The cultural value of autobiography resides in being subjective and internal –the truths it portrays are not necessarily verifiable factually– as well as objective and external –the historical and social issues it exposes refer us to certifiable, exterior realities. Hence, autobiography becomes a matter of the spirit and of the mind. While aware of the complex nature of the concept ‘narratives of the self,’ which might encompass other life writings beyond autobiographies, such as testimonials, diaries, epistles and private correspondence, etc., this study considers the terms ‘life writing,’ ‘narrative of the self,’ and ‘autobiography’ as synonyms.

The present project looks at the four autobiographies by Rodriguez as individual, yet interconnected works. Stemming from a preoccupation with issues regarding identity, the approach has been to consider the major topics of each autobiography: bilingual education and affirmative action; the impact of the culture of origin with regards to the diasporic subject; race and ethnicity as constituents of identity; the integration of two diverse issues such as religion and sexuality in the identitarian makeup of the autobiographer. While the different chapters that deal with the literary works appear to treat detached, unconnected themes, there is a pervasive look that considers Rodriguez’s oeuvre as a whole. In fact the same themes appear in all the autobiographic installments, and it has been duly noted as such. The chapter that analyzes with Rodriguez’s sexuality is a clear example of this. Also, following the author’s lead, his third book has been also studied from the premise that it is a coda of his earlier narratives.

In order to situate the four books in their context, the project looks at the emergence and development of autobiography as a genre, and its relation to literary theory. It was deemed essential, as well, to place Richard Rodriguez in the specific literary context of Chicano autobiography, especially given his controversial standing within the field. Richard Rodriguez is a particularly appropriate author to study when it comes to consider issues of identity because of the contradictory positions he adopts in approaching his own. Representation is a key factor in ascribing to an identity, but being recognized with such markers –in other words, being identified– is equally crucial. Rodriguez seems to be at a crux here. Autobiography is an ideal literary genre to reflect on issues of identity, owing to its nature.

Autobiography as literary genre

Autobiography has been approached from different theoretical perspectives, and as a consequence of it, the analysis of the autobiographical genre has benefited from an array of literary theories and schools of criticism. Understanding what elements contribute to classifying narratives of the self and autobiographies as a genre is not merely an issue of defining the term, and yet a working definition seems indispensable. For the majority of readers, an autobiography would be the narration of a person’s life told by that same person; in a sense, it would be the biography of a person written by the subject of it. However, this basic definition falls short for a more inquisitive reader, since the notion of autobiography involves questions of identity and, thus, becomes a complex issue. In order to clearly establish the concept of autobiography, one must consider the emergence of the term itself and its development, as well as how literary theory and criticism have approached the field and, in turn, shaped it.

Coining the term

When it comes to autobiography, scholars have suggested several dates ranging from the 18^th to the 19^th centuries that may mark the emergence of the term itself. However, before this name appeared as such, texts that reflected on the life of the self had been called confessions and self-biographies, whether hyphenated or not. It was Isaac D’Israeli who, in 1796, coined the English neologism self-biography to designate the narrative of the self in his Miscellanies or Literary Recreations. Later on, D’Israeli used the hyphenated term auto-biography when describing a series of paintings as “an auto-biography in a series of remarkable scenes painted under the eye of the describer of them” (Curiosities 141), and afterward, in the essay titled “Sentimental Biography,” the author differentiated between biography and auto-biography (414).

German literature is at the core when it comes to the formation of autobiography as a literary genre. Already in the Stuttgart of 1791, the publication by the Mäntler brothers of Christian F.D. Schubart’s Leben und Gesinnungen Von Ihm Selbst, in Kerker Aufgesetzt sees a switch from biographers. In the realm of English letters, Felicity Nussbaum proffers this German ancestry of the genre in her 1989 book The Autobiographical Subject. However, Robert Folkenflik challenges the historical account of the term that Nussbaum posits and claims that autobiography appears in print for the first time in 1786, thus predating any German usage of the term. The text in question that Folkenflik cites is the preface to the fourth edition of Ann Yearsley’s Poems, On Several Occasions, which describes the work as autobiographical narrative. However, upon examination of the preface in question, there is no evidence of the word autobiographical, although there are several appearances of the word narrative, and the text is itself autobiographical in nature. Both Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their second edition of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010) note that “[a]lthough Ann Yearsley’s preface to the fourth edition … is an extended autobiographical refutation of the charge of ingratitude to her patron, Hannah More, the autobiographical does not appear in its title (“Mrs. Yearsley’s Narrative”),” (297) and they mention private correspondence with Robert Folkenflik acknowledging his error. This brings us back to D’Israeli’s text as the first evidence in print of the term autobiography in the English language. Nonetheless, Folkenflik refers to self-biography and autobiography as synonyms, and remarks that until the 20^th century the word memoir also serves as a synonym.

With regards to the appearance of the word autobiography in an English title, Folkenflik credits a series that first came out in 1826 under the title Autobiography: A Collection of the Most Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published, Written by the Parties Themselves. And, while Felicity Nussbaum and Jacques Voisine mention W.P. Scargill’s The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister (1834) as the first work to carry the term in its title, Folkenflik affirms that several other texts appeared before then: William Brown’s The Autobiography, or Narrative of a Soldier (1829), Matthew Carey’s Autobiographical Sketches: in a Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend (1829) among others. John Galt published two works under the titles The Member: An Autobiography and The Radical: An Autobiography; Galt went on to bring out The Autobiography of John Galt in 1833. It seems that by 1834 the term autobiography was widely accepted. For instance, in addition to Scargill’s text, Sir Egerton Brydges published The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries of Sir Egerton Brydges, and women writers were also producing titles, such as Elizabeth Wright Macauley’s Autobiographical Memoirs. By the 1840s, the frequency of the term in titles had increased, and perhaps one of the most widely-known titles today is that of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847).

Establishing a canon

Narratives of the self and autobiographies existed before the term was minted, as George May suggests with his expression “autobiography avant la lettre.” Many of these texts stand as classics in world literature, let alone in their respective national literary canons: Socrates’s Apology (399 BC), published by Plato, where the Stoic philosopher delves inward; Saint Augustine and Rousseau; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus’s attempt to understand the impact of the universal on an individual’s life in the year 180; Saint Augustine’s Confessions (ca. 400), a text where confession as a form of autobiography underscores issues of intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature by means of the author’s exposing his mind and soul, thus spurring ‘confessional autobiography’ as a model until the Renaissance. Dante Alighieri penned a sequence of poetry and prose, an account of his love for Beatrice as well as his apology for romantic poetry, under the title of La Vita Nuova (1294). The year 1436 marks the completion of The Book of Margery Kempe, which details her travels and her alleged mystic experiences of divine revelation. While the book is written in third person and she refers to herself as “this creature,” many scholars consider it the first autobiography in the English language, while others differ, based on the fact that Kempe was illiterate and she dictated the book to two scribes, and refer to it as a “confession of faith.” Spanish Christian mystic Teresa de Ávila completes The Life of Teresa of Jesus in 1565. Later in that century, in 1580, Michel de Montaigne publishes his Essays for the first time, which he had started writing in 1572. He would continue to enlarge the text in subsequent years, and published major expanded editions in 1582 and 1588. In 1637, René Descartes publishes his autobiographical and philosophical treatise entitled Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. English Puritan John Bunyan published Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners in 1666. Around 1740 American Puritan Jonathan Edwards pens Personal Narrative. Between 1766 and 1770 Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes his Confessions, a confessional autobiography published in two parts in 1782 and 1789, respectively. A projected third part was never completed. While published posthumously in 1791 and in French, Benjamin Franklin wrote the unfinished record of his own life from 1771 to 1790: what is now known as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. British historian and M.P. Edward Gibbon starts composing his Memoirs of My Life and Writings in 1788, which constitute a series of six fragmentary autobiographical accounts that were compiled and published in 1796, after Gibbon’s death.

As seen, most of the narratives of the self written before the 19^th century can be classified in three categories, corresponding to their principal intentions: confession, apology, and memoir. The confession has to do with issues independent of the social determining factors of the writer: the author bares his or her self in order to reveal intrinsic truths about the self. The apology articulates the autobiographer’s coherent and mature position as a comeback to a critical opposition. The memoir is a literary device by which the writer documents the historical event(s) in which she or he had an involvement. The start of the 19^th century marks a distinct approach to life writings: relating the account of one’s life is worthy of attention because the individual merits intrinsically the attention. Autobiography becomes a literary record of human evolution in individuality.

William Wordsworth started an autobiographical poem in 1798, which he intended as an appendix to a work under the title The Recluse. In 1804 he expands this “poem to Coleridge,” as he called it, and decides to make it a prologue instead of an appendix to the bigger piece. He finished the thirteen-volume opus in 1805 but refused to publish it. In 1850, his widow posthumously published the autobiography (or “the poem on the growth of my own mind,” as he called it) under the title The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem. By this time Robert Southey, another of the Lake Poets, had already used the word autobiography in the Quarterly Review.

The year 1845 is when Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself was published, and within four months of this publication, five thousand copies were sold. Having received many positive reviews, by 1860 almost 30,000 copies were sold. Ten years after the first publication of the first autobiography by the abolitionist leader, in 1854, Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, or Life in the Woods. A year later, in 1855, Frederick Douglass publishes his second autobiography: My Bondage and My Freedom; and P.T. Barnum put together his first autobiography Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, which he published massively in order to promote himself and, in turn, his business. Barnum’s other autobiography, which had the same purpose, is Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ Recollections of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1869).

The first autobiography by a female slave, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, published in 1881 and revised in 1892, is Douglass’ third autobiography. In it, the abolitionist gave more details about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery than he could in his two previous autobiographies, because of the emancipation of slaves in the US. It is also the only one of his autobiographies that deals with his life during and after the Civil War. By 1897, Oscar Wilde writes Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, which is published bowdlerized in 1905 as De Profundis. After a turbulent history of editions, the full, corrected text saw the light in 1962 in Rupert Hart-Davis’s The Letters of Oscar Wilde.

Danish émigré to the United States, Jacob Riis, published his autobiography The Making of an American in 1901. Six year later, in 1907, The Education of Henry Adams is printed privately and distributed by its author. Its commercial publication did not happen until 1918, after Henry Adams’ death, to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize a year later. Bicontinental writer Henry James wrote three autobiographies in the 1910s: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and the incomplete, posthumous The Middle Years (1917). Lithuanian immigrant to the U.S. and anarchist feminist Emma Goldman penned Living My Life in 1931. In 1932, John G. Neihardt transcribes the autobiography of Lakota medicine man Black Elk, under the title Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. This book has caused quite a controversy, due to issues of authorship: Native Americans and scholars have questioned whether Neihardt’s account is accurate and fully represents the views or words of Black Elk. H.G. Wells published Experiment on Autobiography in September of 1934. By now, the boundaries between autobiography and other genres start to blur. Hence, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) is seen as both a novel as well as an autobiography. In 1937, Gertrude Stein published Everybody’s Autobiography, which was devised as the continuation of her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In 1945 Richard Wright published Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, putting off until 1977 the publication of the second part of his autobiography: American Hunger. French-American mystic Thomas Merton issued his spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948. The decade of the 1960s sees the following autobiographies penned by American figures: Man Ray’s Self-Portrait (1963), Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), which seeks to muddle the limits among history, fiction, and narrative of the self.

As one can see by the 1960s, the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the so-called ‘ethnic’ writers have found a literary tradition within the autobiographical genre. There were already texts in circulation written by authors whose identity was “hyphenated” –i.e. Danish-American, Lithuanian-American, African-American, Mexican-American, etc.– but the late 1960s saw an increase in these texts. In a sense, autobiography as a genre has helped in its history to democratize literature. This is particularly relevant in the context of the United States, where autobiography provided forms of cultural enfranchisement to the non-mainstream communities, whether they be ‘ethnic,’ non-heteronormative, and/or feminist. This increase in life narratives by women, the working class, the poor, the minorities has brought to national attention their social conditions, and has helped depict the actual composite of the nation, whether social, cultural, or otherwise.

While African-American literature might come quickly to mind when speaking of life narratives by minorities (from the autobiographies of Douglass to those of Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Sidney Poitier, Maya Angelou, to President Obama –to name a few), other groups have also produced narratives of the self. Among the Asian-American autobiographies one should mention Chiang Yee’s The Silent Traveller (1937), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), Monlin Chiang’s Tides From the West: A Chinese Autobiography (1947), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dicteé (1980), Akira Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography (1982), Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (1986), Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines (1992), and Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003).

US Latino authors have not been extraneous to this, and have often resorted to the narratives of the self to build and cement a group conscience in the community. Autobiographical writing has not been profuse in Hispanic letters –whether Latin American or Spanish– but these authors do take advantage of the richer tradition in English letters. The following canon does not intend to be exhaustive.

Among the narratives of the self-penned by Puerto Ricans in the continental US, one must mention Pachín Marín’s “Nueva York por dentro,” which appeared in 1892 in the New York newspaper La gaceta del pueblo. Las memorias de Bernardo Vega, published posthumously in 1977, is another seminal life narrative that describes the life of Puerto Ricans in New York at the beginning of the 20^th century, and the importance of tobacco workers in the political and social life of both the homeland and the US. Similarly, Jesús Colón collected a series of personal short narratives in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961), which garnered greater attention after critic Juan Flores published a new edition in 1982. William Carlos Williams explores the ambivalence of his ancestry -–his father was British while his mother was Puerto Rican, and he himself grew up in the West Indies– in his Autobiography (1951). Perhaps one of the most popular autobiographies by a Nuyorican is Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) a Bildungsroman about a life amidst racism, marginality, and displacement. He followed this text with two other personal narratives Saviour, Saviour, Hold My Hand (1972) and Seven Long Times (1974). Tato Laviera’s AmeRícan (1985), Miguel Piñero’s La Bodega Sold Dreams (1980), and Sandra María Esteves’ Yerba Buena: Dibujos y poemas (1980) are central autobiographical texts by writers of the Nuyorican Poets Café. Martín Espada’s poetry often combines autobiography with struggle and resistance; among his autobiographical poems “Revolutionary Spanish Lessons,” “Niggerlips” from Rebellion is the Circle in a Lover’s Hands (1990), and “My Name is Espada” from A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000) can be listed. Essential to autobiographical poetry is the popular “Ending Poem” included in Getting Home Alive (1986) written by both Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales, mother and daughter, where they explore their Latina identity. Among other life narratives by women writers, mention must be made of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing (1990), Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1994), Nicholasa Mohr’s Growing Up inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination (1994).

Among the Cuban-American authors, the following life writings must be acknowledged: Pablo Medina’s Pork Rind and Cuban Songs (1975) and Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (1990), Achy Obejas’ collection of stories We Came All The Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994) in which the writer blends memoir with essay, Virgil Suarez’s Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood (1997) that combines poetry, fiction, and essays in a remembrance of childhood, violence, and loss. Richard Blanco’s first collection of poetry, under the title City of a Hundred Fires (1998), draws on this Madrid-born Cuban-American’s upbringing in Miami and describes the tensions growing up as a Latino immigrant, a child of working-class exiles. He is better known for another autobiographical poem, “One Today” which he read at the 2013 Obama Presidential Inauguration, being the first Latino writer to be invited to read at a U.S. Presidential Inauguration ceremony. Most recently, he has published his prose autobiography: The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (2014).

Playwright María Irene Fornés explored her Cuban heritage in her play Letters from Cuba (2000), based on the more than two hundred letters she received from her elder brother, who remained in the island. This divide is also explored in My Father Sings, To My Embarrassment (2002) by Sandra M. Castillo, who writes of her childhood memories in Cuba and the shared anguish of those who left and those who stayed.

Also in 2002, Ruth Behar explores issues of identity in her autobiographical documentary for television Adio Kerida: Goodbye My Dear Love. Behar has created in her literature a voice that represents herself and her subject: a woman who has been culturally translated. As a Cuban Jew, Behar has continued to explore what she calls ‘Jubanidad’ in her book An Island Called Home: Returning to a Jewish Cuba (2007), an autobiographical text that incorporates photography, continuing in the contemporary trend of blurring borders between autobiography and other genres. In 2013, Behar penned Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys, where displacement is the motif that allows the writer to relate her memories of Cuba, Spain, Poland, … Another writer who has explored his Jewish Cuban roots is José Kozer in Una huella destartalada: diarios (2003).

An example of how autobiography in the 21^st century is blurring the once clear distinction between literary genres is Carlos M. Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003). While the author conceived the text as a novel, the publisher released it as a memoir, eventually winning the 2003 National Book Award in the nonfiction category. Cuban-Americans continue to publish narratives of the self in our decade: Enrique del Risco issued Siempre nos quedará Madrid (2012), his personal account about leaving Cuba for Spain, and his subsequent arrival in the United States. The works of Richard Blanco have already been pointed out.

Among the Dominican American writers, one should highlight Julia Álvarez’s Something To Declare (1998), a text that, again, blurs the limits between autobiography and essay. These literary canons are by no means exhaustive, but they aim to be a brief representation of how life writing is an important part of the literary traditions of the most relevant communities in U.S. Latino letters.

The writings of the self have served Latinos, and Mexican-Americans and Chicanos specifically, to establish an identity within the U.S. and to build a sense of community during much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This group-conscience building might have been more apparent during the Civil Rights Movement, but it does extend back to the times of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty and stretches up to our times.

Mapping the genre

Undoubtedly autobiography exists and, subsequently, one must wonder what constitutes the genre, formally speaking. As Virginia Woolf states in a 1935 letter to her nephew Julian Bell: “… all we can do is to herd books into groups…and thus we get English literature into A B C; one, two, three; and lose all sense of what it’s about.” (Bell 173n) In our impulse to classify into groups, define and categorize, sometimes a definition that obscures the defined is constructed, thus becoming moot.

As it has been observed, autobiography is a textual expression that has been solidly established for several centuries already, although recognition as a literary genre did not occur until the twentieth century. In part, this lack of recognition as literature –and hence, as a literary genre– stems from it not being granted aesthetic value. Elizabeth Bruss puts forward that the only effective definition would be one that reflects a literary category that can be experienced as something that constrains or directs the acts of reading and writing and allows both reader and writer an interpretation of their actions (1).

In order to become a genre, a literary text must comprise recognizable features, and the roles and purposes that make up said text must be relatively stable within a community of readers and writers. In this way, a genre is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution: “those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history.” (40) In this sense, a literary genre –in our case autobiography as a genre– depends on the organizing nature of human beings.

However, recognizing the autobiography as an established genre does not imply there have been no changes. Russian formalist Tynjanov already pointed out the variable nature of genres when he stated in “On Literary Evolution”: “The novel, which seems to be an integral genre that has developed in and of itself over the centuries, turns out to be not an integral whole but a variable. Its material changes from one literary system to another […] we cannot […] define the genre of a work if it is isolated from the system. For example, what was called an ode in the 1820s or by Fet was so labeled on the basis of features different from those used to define an ode in Lomonosov’s time.” (70)

Bruss cleverly points out that in spite of the existence of elements within a given text that “help us recognize what generic force it should have, we cannot state a priori what these features will be […] Outside the social and literary conventions that create and maintain it, autobiography has no features –has in fact no being at all.” (6) When it comes to consider autobiography as a literary genre, we need to combine change with continuity in autobiographical writing, and build our justification in a way that it will not misrepresent individual autobiographies. So as to achieve this, one needs to look at the form of a text, as well as at the function assigned to that text.

Although autobiography has been around in literature for centuries, and the subject referred to specifically with that name has existed for a bit more than two hundred years, as it was illustrated in the previous sections, critical interest in the field is more recent. German philosopher Georg Misch (1878-1965) wrote Geschichte der Autobiographie, a monumental history of autobiography in several volumes, the first of which was published in 1907. However, the first English edition would not come out until 1950 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Misch’s publication set off an increasing interest in studying the area from a critical and theoretical perspective. While the philosopher’s focus was from a historical perspective, it signaled some shift from previous interest in the field. In the past, both readers and critics expressed a concern for the self. Those who were attracted to a particular author’s work found in the writer’s life an answer that allowed them to better understand his or her texts and at the same time it was a motivator for reading. According to this deterministic outlook, one could understand a text through the analysis of its source, thus establishing a causal relation between the author and his/her work. By providing a more historical approach, Misch opened the door for other critics who dealt with the study of autobiography based on the notion of a preexisting ontological self. Misch defined autobiography as “the description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (autos)” (5) and affirms that it is intrinsically linked to its time and period: “autobiographies are bound always to be representative of their period, within a range that will vary with the intensity of the author’s participation in contemporary life and with the sphere in which they moved.” (12) Thus, only individuals who have led lives in the public arena, or who have had crucial participation in historical events, and/or are famous, are the appropriate agents of an autobiography. This responds to the strict divide between high and low culture, proper of that time. This historical perspective, and consequently this division between high culture and low culture, will be challenged much later with the interest in micro-history by the marginalized minorities. In a sense they try to overcome Misch’s restrictive notion of autobiography; a notion that is also prescriptive, in the vogue of his time. By separating high and low culture, many forms of recording private life –letters, journals, diaries, etc.– were excluded from the genre, and from scholar attention.

New Criticism considered autobiography a lesser form of literature, and the critical study of the genre became dormant. Thus, the next seminal study on the genre, Georges Gusdorf’s “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” published in 1956, became a milestone by claiming that autobiography is something specific to culture: “[t]he author of an autobiography gives a sort of relief to his image by reference to the environment with its independent existence.”(29) Gusdorf, who launched what later would be called the classic theory of autobiography, asserted that autobiography was a firmly established genre whose history could be easily established through the masterpieces of Western literature. For him, autobiography is limited in time and space: it is a late occurrence in Western culture, beginning with the embedding of Christian contributions –especially the idea of confession– into Western traditions. Gusdorf goes on further to affirm that non-Western narratives of the self, such as Gandhi’s, use Western means –the autobiographical genre– to uphold the East. Thus, he surmises that the concern of the self by Western man has been a useful tool in intellectually colonizing the other and a means to systematically conquer the world (28-29). Moreover, for Gusdorf, it is peculiar to western man the idea of narrating one’s own life in order to elongate such life even beyond death, again recalling Christian concepts and, therefore, obliterating Eastern notions of life writing. In a sense, and according to Gusdorf’s ideas, the autobiographer delights in being looked at and believes her/his achievements should not be forgotten, thus disappear, with her/his passing. Thus, autobiography develops in a cultural system where consciousness of self is central, which will point towards issues of identity. Gusdorf points out that while in biography the historian –who is aware of carrying out a task similar to that of an artist– is removed from his subject of study by the passage of time and/or a social distance, in autobiography artist and model coincide, and the historian regards himself as object of study. Thus, the interest, indicates Gusdorf, is turned from public to private history. As the theoretician explains, the image depicted in autobiography “is another “myself,” a double of my being […] invested with a sacred character that makes it at once fascinating and frightening.”(32) The critic brings in the psychological theories of Jacques Lacan about the mirror stage in the formation of the self. For Gusdorf, autobiography and the mirror reinforce the ritual of self-examination encouraged by Christianity: the self presents her/his accounts according to some rhetorical tenets. Renaissance and Reformation remove penitence from the self-examination, since Western man starts to disregard the tarnish of the transcendent, and sees himself a man of nature. This is the self that Montaigne brings forth in his Essays, where there is no adherence to any doctrine, thus becoming secularized, and man starts to reveal facets of his individuality. This new freedom of the individual allows him to believe that everything is at his reach. This praise of the individual self, heightened in Romanticism, brought new interest in autobiography. Individuality as a virtue is related to the concept of sincerity: the value of telling all, which Rousseau advocated. The emphasis now is on the complexity of man, and his contradictions as a human being. Therefore, autobiography is veering away from the model of Christian confession and into a form bolstered by the principles of the psychological.

We can argue, then, that Georges Gusdorf noticed the Western man’s common interest in the consciousness of the singularity of individual life, even if that life reflects a cultural and historical totality. With the studies in historiography by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch, Gusdorf assumed that the artistic and literary purpose of autobiography was secondary to its anthropological function, an assumption which, on the one hand, was a departure from the tenets of the New Criticism and, on the other, established the basis to believe in autobiography as a genre committed to convey truth.

According to this understanding of the genre, the limits to which Gusdorf refers in the title to his seminal article are those of time and space, as they are applied to contemporary Western culture. As a result of the ideas owing to both anthropology and history, man positions autobiography in its cultural moment. Context, then, becomes an integral part of the discourse. Not only does the author consider her/his life worthy of special interest, but s/he gives witness of her/his self and rebuilds her/his own history reorganizing the events in a comprehensive outline that is aimed to allow the author to safeguard her/his legacy which in the views of the autobiographer must not wane. It is important to underline the efforts on the part of the author to compose a narrative in retracing a part of her/his life, and not just put together a series of life events side by side. To this purpose, the author distances from her/his self so that s/he can re-create her/his self in the focal point of the text both within a given cultural moment and across time. In other words, the autobiographer has the benefit of finding out and uncovering her/his self from the other side of the mirror and the advantage of doing justice to herself/himself better that anyone else. Through autobiography, Gusdorf posits, the author restores an incomplete or deformed truth, the text being devoted then to the defense and/or exaltation of the author’s life. It is, then, a task of personal salvation. However, the narrative of a life is not the mimetic double of such life. The past is gone and one is in front of a re-creation of the past where conscious discourses blend with unconscious motivations in the narrating of a life. According to Gusdorf, “the narrative is conscious, and since the narrator’s consciousness directs the narrative, it seems to him incontestable that it has also directed his life.” (41). However, memory brings back details in a particular light, which is an unconscious process. When it comes to narrate a life, the narrative itself bestows a given significance to the event depicted, which might be different to the one it had when it originally occurred, or just one significance out of many, or even an importance it never had to begin with. This brings us back to the idea of truth that was key in the confessional autobiographies of the earlier times. Because the narrating of a life is a re-presentation, it cannot be a mere “record of existence, an account book or a logbook,” (Gusdorf 42) but a recounting of events with a given meaning, a meaning that is subordinated to the truth of the author, subjected to both: his unconscious view of the events, and his conscious effort to construct the narrative. Autobiographical truth is, hence, subjective truth. An element that takes part of that subjective truth is the effort of the author to re-construct herself/himself in her/his own resemblance at a given time. The narrative of self is a historical document about a life. In this sense, the early theorists of autobiography followed the ideas of Dilthey: man is a historical being. And according to the German positivist philosopher, we understand everything (whether outside or inside of us) in relation to what we are: history is linked to our autobiography.

Gusdorf, however, notices that there is a literary element in autobiography, which is “of greater importance than the historic and objective function,” (43) but the French scholar is reluctant to give it a central role, for he claims that the literary is less important than the anthropological (43-44). Gusdorf views re-presentation as a problem: the rhetorical relationship between what autobiography is and what it represents. Given that autobiography cannot be a faithful account of life but just an account, Gusdorf views it as a symbol or “the parable of a consciousness in quest of its own truth.” (44) As the individual is always in progress, autobiography is never a fixed, unchanging, image of such life but the fixing of a creation of such existence at a given time. It fixes a retrospective look but not a finished life. In sum, Gusdorf underlines that autobiography does not reveal the objective events or periods of a life but the attempts of a writer to provide with meaning the myth of his/her re-created life.

Following Gusdorf’s theories, Roy Pascal wrote Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), where he revealed his interest in the individuality of self. By asserting that autobiography is a product of Western civilization subsequent to the Roman times, Pascal laid emphasis on defining the subject as a sieve through which the outside world is filtered, and in the fact that the selectivity with which certain experiences are accumulated creates a bigger truth than the objective account of an era by a historian or biographer.

After Gusdorf and Pascal, this historic treatment of the self ended in a series of criticism about autobiography that received the label of transcendentalist or existentialist, in reference to the notion of a pre-existing, autonomous self from which autobiography would derive. This branch of criticism was interested in the authorial subject, whether just in the self or as provider of insight into the writer’s work.

It was unavoidable that the historic perspective of autobiography as a culturally determined phenomenon, dependent on certain notions of individualism, took some theoreticians to specifically relate the origin of the genre with Romanticism and its enthusiasm with subjectivity; more so when it was the Romantics the ones who saw the work as the clear materialization of the author’s creative genius. They used the “I” in its more personal dimension, even existentialist one may say, to the point of opening the possibility to assert that all of the Romantic works can be interpreted from the standpoint of autobiography, regardless of their genre.

James Olney’s Metaphors of Self (1972) opens the genre to a higher theoretical plateau, allowing for the concept of subjectivity to become part of the analysis. This led to the challenging of that prescriptive and restrictive notion of autobiography that earlier theoreticians had conceived. In turn, the ways of self-narrating, and of approaching autobiography expanded.

William Boelhower puts the emphasis on the fragmentation and de-centering of identity. For him, autobiography in the mid-1900s displayed a rupture from modernism in reflecting the fluidity of identity. By bringing de-centered identities into the discussion, Boelhower opens a new direction of analysis.

This de-centering of the self leads Michel Leiris to parallel the examination of the self with the analysis of others. This triggers the concept that autobiography is an apostrophe, an address to the other, which presents the writer’s ideas to others in a communicative circuit. This is particularly evident in the case of serial autobiographies; that is, successive autobiographies by a writer that appear with a given cadence. This is the case of the writer in this study: Richard Rodriguez has published a new autobiography every ten years approximately. By addressing the others in an apostrophic manner, autobiography shatters the limits of the genre to particularized lives. Leiris, who is an ethnologist and ethnographer by training, helps understand how the “I,” by being subjected to the presence of the others, becomes the self of a community. Thus, personal autobiography can become the autobiography of a community, something that is of particular interest to underrepresented groups within the genre, namely the so-called “ethnic” communities. This brings about a particular problem; that of being both the subject and the object of the autobiographical discourse, which Roland Barthes explores in his autobiography. Other writers will explore issues of language and representation in their inquiry on the self, calling autobiography into question and attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of conceiving the genre in a traditional way.

Postcolonial and multicultural critics also propose alternatives to the traditional notion of self. This becomes germane to the analysis of autobiographies by non-mainstream authors. Calling Western norms of identity and experience into question, these autobiographers bring their status as the West’s “others” and their demand to be taken into account within the cultural discourse into the limelight. For these authors and critics, contemporary autobiographies are invested with a redemptive quality that is essential to the genre. These autobiographical acts construct subject positions through which to contest displacement and marginality, and posit a new subjectivity, based on its hybrid, transcultural, diasporic, and/or nomadic nature. These narratives of the self move the “I” towards the collective and challenge traditional boundaries of identification. Derridean deconstruction, Barthesian semiotics, and Foucaultian discursive notion of power are significant theoretical foundations.

Karl Weintraub in The Value of the Individual (1978) saw in autobiography the genre that emerged as corollary of the valuation of Western culture. Weintraub focused on the history of individuality from Saint Augustine to Goethe, and he noticed a clear escalation in individualism once the 19^th century began. This rapid development has its explanation in the fact that it is not until then that the point of view of the individual and the self-consciousness of the author were articulated with considerable prominence. Then, autobiography starts to be judged by its truth-value, which is no other than the subjective truth of the author’s opinion on his or her life. Because author and subject are considered the same entity, there is the need of certain consistency between style and subject: autobiography.

When it comes to establish a theory of the autobiographical genre, scholars have explored many more variations of autobiography as an individual or social dimension of the intellectual or moral character, depending on the times. However, the most outstanding intellectual when it comes to formulate a formal generic definition of autobiography is Philippe Lejeune. He is the first theoretician to devote a considerable effort to establish categorical differences between autobiography and the novel, even though the former employs resources that one normally associates to the latter, let alone the fusion of autobiography and fiction by some writers. Lejeune tried to define autobiography in L’Autobiographie en France (1971) but he realized that such definition needed to be further clarified and refined, in part because the theoretical discussion surrounded the same triangle: fiction, biography and autobiography and the relationships between the latter and the former two terms. In order to shed light on the nature of the genre, Lejeune published in 1975 his fundamental essay Le Pacte autobiographique. For Lejeune, autobiography consists of a “[r]etrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.” (4) This definition requires that the text is narrative and in prose; its subject is the life of an individual and/or the story of a personality; the author and narrator are one and the same; the narrator and the protagonist coincide, and the narrator takes a retrospective viewpoint. Thus, Lejeune isolates autobiography from memoirs (these are not the account of an individual life); from biography (the narrator is not the same as the protagonist); from personal novels (where author and narrator are not one); from diaries and journals (where the narration is not retrospective); from the autobiographical poem (since the text would not be in prose); and from the essay (which Lejeune does not regard as having a retrospective point of view nor a narrative form).

Therefore, according to Lejeune, the textual attribute by which one can distinguish more autobiography from fiction is framed in a contract, or pact, between the text and the reader. This pact starts with the attribution of authorship from the title page of the text, and continues the length of the work. Thanks to this autobiographical pact; that is, by means of the autobiographer’s first name, the self-referential dimension of the text finds verifiable referents in society and in history. Within the tradition of first person narrative, which is the dominant tradition in the genre, identity is shared at the same level by author, narrator, and protagonist. One can state that narrative in autobiography is the statute of self-reference, and the identification among them of the three constituents of the self in the text. This “pact” establishes the identity among author, narrator, and protagonist, and serves to uphold the borders between autobiography and the novel. Contrary to other forms of fiction, Lejeune observes that autobiography offers actual, non-hypothetical information on an outside reality, which in turn makes him consider the issue of authenticity in autobiographical writing. Because of the “autobiographical pact,” Lejeune is able to demarcate the space of autobiography against other neighboring fields, such as that of biography, memoirs, diaries, biographical sketches, or first person novel, since one cannot detect in these the autodiegetic identification that the French theoretician posits.

While Lejeune allows for some relaxation in the limits he establishes –”[i]t is obvious that the different categories are not all equally restrictive: certain conditions can be met for the most part without being satisfied completely,” (5)– his definition of autobiography is meant to be quite limiting. And while he distinguishes between autobiographical poems and autobiographies, other contemporary scholars see the possibility of an autobiography in poetic form. Likewise, some autobiographies can adopt features proper to the essay form; namely those of Richard Rodriguez, for instance.

The crucial element for Lejeune is the distinction between autobiography, biography and the personal novel, which he summarizes in the strict observance to the following features: the author, narrator and protagonist must be identical in the case of autobiography. This has been summarized among the scholars of the genre as the “autobiographical pact,” echoing Lejeune’s title. By calling this a pact, it stresses the need of the reader to agree to read the text with the implied accord that protagonist, narrator and author are one and the same entity.

Lejeune himself observed that this autobiographical pact is not without problems. These issues arise in part from the challenges that the notion of identity presents, especially in regards to its inscription in the text and its relation to the construction of a discourse. The French scholar asks himself how the author’s and narrator’s identity appear in the autobiographical text. In some instances, he contends, there may be narration in third person and, thus, identity is not ascertained by the use of the “I.” The reader, then, may be facing a biography in spite of being consistent with the essence of the autobiographical genre. Since this is not the case in the autobiographies of Rodriguez, we will set aside these considerations. In Rodriguez’s case, the “I” does not lose himself in anonymity, but there is a proper name behind the first person, following Lejeune’s assertion. When it comes to the written autobiography, the proper name along the title or on the cover assumes responsibility and is automatically linked to the “I” of the text. Furthermore, it is the only incontestable link between the text and the world beyond it. By social convention, the author is a real person responsible for the creating a discourse, whose existence is beyond doubt. To this effect, pseudonyms are but another given name; however, they essentially do not alter anything regarding the issue of identity, especially since in the text the author might explain the origin of such pen name. To Lejeune there is a distinction when it comes to considering the authorship of autobiographical texts: there has to be other non-autobiographical texts for the autobiographical space to exist, in other words, to instill in the reader a sign of reality. Autobiography, therefore, assumes an identity claimed at the level of enunciation. The uttered similarity between the life of the character and the author is secondary, while the texts where there is no claimed identity but the reader suspects of similarity between protagonist, narrator and author are autobiographical novels. The autobiographical pact allows no room for guessing or suspecting: there must be no doubt, or it must be explained at the beginning of the text, that the “I” refers to the author. In the case of the four texts analyzed in this book, the author has explicitly declared them as autobiographies. In this way, Rodriguez’s autobiographies align with Lejeune understanding of identity: “a fact immediately grasped –accepted or refused, at the level of enunciation.” (21)

Criticism to Lejeune’s paradigm stems from his lack of rigor in applying the “autobiographical pact” once he realized his definition was limiting. Including the work of Sartre and leaving Proust in an ambiguous area between autobiography and fiction, the theoretician seems to mine the definition of the genre he had laid down.

Elizabeth Bruss publishes her Autobiographical Acts in 1776, where she also focuses in the referential quality of the autobiographical. Bruss’s study argues that autobiography cannot be approached by means of chronology, neither as the writer’s disclosure of experience. For the scholar, autobiography is not mimetic, linear but a series of performative acts where memory plays a crucial role. However, a series of requirements need to be met: there must be an identifiable subject, a truth value linked to the honesty of the writer, and a part of what is being treated has to directly relate to the identity of the author. This attempt to define the genre ends up being too restrictive, and it is incapable of closely following the evolution of the autobiographical genre in the last decades of the 20^th century and the first of the following one. Bruss’ theory remains in the concrete without arriving to the realm of the general.

Taking the performative nature a step beyond, Louis Renza postulates that the writer brings the past to the present by way of memory, and that process is not a simple recollection. As a consequence of this “presentifying” of the past, as the scholar calls it, the past informs the moment of the writing. Autobiography, hence, is an active cognitive process. One can argue, then, that in autobiography there are three times: that of the past, that of the actual writing –which is informed by the past–, and that of the reading –which is informed by the reader himself.

As it can be seen, by now there is an established opposition to those theoreticians who defended the substantiation of autobiography from external factors to the text. The prevailing scholars center their analyses in the exploration of the self by the self, and thus, they favor the intentional content of the text, going further than the representative value of the narration. William Spengemann treats autobiography as a genre that evolves from history to philosophy, to end up in the realm of poetics. Far from limiting the scope of the genre, he widens it when he declares that in contemporary writing that which started as a biography of the self takes on features belonging to fiction.

For his part, Richard Coe adopts a thematic approach when he attempts to define a variation of narrative of the self closely related to the childhood experience. This leads him to bring about the notion of inner truth in place of a historically verifiable truth. This inner truth, often a symbolic and even poetic one, is exclusive to the author. Therefore, the autobiographical text is closely related to the novel, since it mainly deals with a narrative sequence that reflects the development of the author’s self until he or she acquires a certain degree of maturity.

Linda Peterson posits that the difference between novel and writing of the self resides in that the former is concerned with the narration, with the expression of a self, and with representation, while the latter focuses on the interpretation of self by the same self whereas the narrative structure is not a central feature. Despite the fact that Peterson centers her study in English Victorian texts, her distinction can be applied to a broader theoretical frame. This application is also backed by the influence of Victorian letters in subsequent narratives. As a curiosity it should be remarked here that one of the chapters of the autobiographies analyzed in this book, Days of Obligation, is titled “Late Victorians.”

At the same time that this historical vision based on the existentialist concept of self as an independent entity is being developed, there are attempts to define the autobiographical genre from a deconstructivist perspective, especially after the questioning of the authorial figure that both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault put forward. Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” distinguishes between the author’s emotion and intention, and it is opposed to the personal notion of author inherited from the classics. Foucault sustains that the author’s facts of life limit the texts, stating that the author is “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.” (“What is an Author?” 118) Somewhat differently, Genette questioned any approach that connected the life of the author with his or her work. In Figures III, he considers the literary work as a series of rhetoric strategies that are oblivious to any referent in the real world. By refuting the assumption of a previous existence of an ontological I in an objective world external to the text, deconstructivist theories expropriated autobiographical discourse of the referential truth that classic and essentialist theoreticians transmitted, even though they related other types of truth to these narratives.

Mehlman had affirmed in the mid-1970s that the modern attempts in the field of autobiography revealed the impossibility of re-living one’s life, what later on will be addressed as the impossibility of self-representation. Along these lines, Paul de Man argues that writing of the self, or the texts qualified as autobiographical, offer a mirage of reference rather than a referential truth. For de Man the writing of the self cannot even be considered a genre. Michael Sprinkler is, perhaps, of all deconstructivist theoreticians, the one who goes furthest in his dismantling analysis. Sprinkler posits that both autobiography and the idea of the author as the sovereign of the discourse are purely epistemological products, and they have no validity from the very moment when the ontologic self of the 19^th century has disappeared, thus ending any formal possibility for the writing of the self. Deconstructivist criticism on autobiography evolved into postmodernism. Ihab Hassan considered autobiography an impossible form, since he questioned the possibility of reviving a life without falling in the creases of its own hermeneutic circle.

However there are other stances that have viewed the narratives of the self less as a literary form preoccupied with rhetoric strategies and more as a cognitive form of perception. These psychological orientations are apparent in the critical works of James Olney and Paul John Eakin. By associating with the narrative of the self the terms of metaphor and fictions, respectively, both these scholars posit that autobiographical truth is designed after certain configurations produced by the phenomenological I. That is, they are worried about the mechanics of that mental activity, thus leaving behind the idea of a fixed self, characteristic of the static psychology. In this way, Olney and Eakin perceive autobiography from a theory that can be labeled as theory of perception, based on a notion of a dynamic self that is at the same time operative and experimental.

In Metaphors of Self, James Olney deems the mind of an autobiographer a metaphor generating mechanism. He intuited from the onset that one should not judge the narratives of the self as a formal nor historical matter but rather as the presentation of self in its development through the interference of metaphor, since considering the I from an existentialist point of view, or any other point of view for that matter, becomes irrelevant to the role of that I in the autobiographical text. Therefore, instead of busying himself with the prescribing of an ontology of being, Olney develops what he calls the ontology of autobiography, which he describes as “the order of reality that an autobiography can make claim to.” (“Some Versions” 237) In the same article, he upholds that the I is manifested by means of figurative constructions that transmute their historical past –his or her life– into a second degree life, product of the creative power of the mind: “The bios of an autobiography, we may say, is what the ‘I’ makes of it… neither the autos or the bios is there in the beginning.” (“Some Versions” 247) The creation of this life – bios– in what can be called its derivative results in the ontology of autobiography, which reconstitutes the first narrative and historical level within the phenomenological that is present in the text by virtue of the creative act of remembrance itself. Hence, facts from the past are reinterpreted under the light of the current awareness of the autobiographer, and the relationship between the actual events in the past and those portrayed in the text is based more in their significance than in chronology. In this light, certain elements linked to the life of the author, such as places, times, or individuals are portrayed as universal, eternal, and poetic. By eliminating the narrative and chronologic criteria in regards to the lived events while at the same time avoiding any generic obstacle, Olney centers his attention in the practice of what can be called autobiographical, more than what has been labeled as autobiography according to generic terms strictly. This scholar has also occupied himself in establishing the resources that allow us to operate with a feature present in most of the narratives of the self: the relationship between the I from the present and the I from the past.

With a similar disposition as Olney’s, Paul John Eakin argues that autobiography is a psychological activity typified by a progressive process of creativity and re-invention of the self by himself. According to Eakin, the autobiographical act is a restaging of the drama of identity formation, not as a mere unblemished, transparent record of a completed, polished, refined self but as a decisive stage within the uncertainty, ambiguity, and anguish that self-definition entails.

In his first book, Fictions in Autobiography (1985), Eakin reveals his preoccupation for the degrees of truth and fiction that may be present in formal autobiographies. Already in 1957, Northrop Frye had dealt with the cultural ramifications of literature and by placing autobiography under the epigraph of fiction, he contributed to the ambiguity we perceive today. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye fused together fiction and narrative of the self by means of a gradation that made him classify the texts as “confession” or “fictional autobiography” whether they had been published before or after Rousseau’s Confessions. In Frye’s words, autobiography “merges with the novel by a series of insensible gradations. Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern.” (307)

Instead of starting from this traditional standpoint, passed down from Rousseau, which supports the notion that fiction favors the success of the autobiographical text, Eakin assumes from the onset that autobiographical truth is made up by certain myths or fictions. He asserts that individual personality is ascertained along with the acquisition of language, and that it is a mythical structure. Eakin shows how writers have incorporated fiction in the publication of their lives when they try to touch on biographical truth, and the scholar affirms that it is precisely that intentionality what characterizes autobiography as such. Together with Olney, Eakin believes that one may consider as factual, real, the past that memory formulates, as well as the needs of consciousness in the present; thus, attenuating the differences between the being from the past and the being from the present, and in this way creating a self through the writing of memory.

In Eakin’s Touching the World (1992), the scholar reaffirms the referential structures of narrative and chronology, while at the same time underscoring the interdependence between language and the self, and mitigating the tensions that appear in the debate about autobiographical writing between essentialist and textualist critics. When Eakin upholds that autobiography is a narrative that is necessarily based on temporality, he is defending Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,” although he regards autobiography’s referential art with a caveat: the nature of referentiality in the 20^th century does not necessarily presuppose a simple model of cohesive individuality, something that was characteristic of an earlier epistemology. It is clear, then, that Eakin partakes of a phenomenological notion of self that has its origin in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. It was Ricoeur who analyzed representation of time in narrative by stating that narrative as a reference structure cannot be interpreted as something proper to a specific time, which was a literary convention inherited from the 19^th century historicist paradigm of subject.

Because of the close relationship between contextual referentiality and autobiography, we must approach the ties between sociology and the narratives of the self. This connection is particularly important due to the concerns of literary theory and criticism with ethnic and gender issues. In this sense, the historical treatment of subject has been replaced with these orientations, foci perceived as representative of the social groups that ooze multicultural diversity. Interest on multiculturalism emerges from the social improvements of the 1970s and 1980s, and it acquires special relevance in the field of literary theory from the mid-1980s onwards. In 1994, David T. Goldberg theorizes on the effects of cultural heterogeneity with regard to the individual. It is in this context that the notion of the individuality of the self is being appraised, but instead of examining it as a private subjectivity, it is being studied as a cultural construction where terms such as “the other” and “difference” come up constantly in the critical discourse. This discourse attempts to make inventory of those differences based on gender – feminine, masculine, heterosexual, homosexual– and/or differences grounded on cultural otherness. It aims to define and theorize autobiography by including these variables in the practice of textual analysis.

The narratives of the self have contributed in a significant way to the development of social history and political thought because they offer the possibility of enunciation to individuals who otherwise would be excluded from the spheres of public, social, and political representation. The debates on gender and sexual issues have been important in the development of the social movements of women and of LGBTTQI+ groups. What is more, they have been invaluable in the formulations about the distinctive nature of women’s and of LGBTTQI+ literatures. Because the distinction man/woman and heteronormative/non-heteronormative (whether gay, lesbian, bisexual,…) have function in Western history as basis for social differentiation, one can assert that issues of identity, experience and representation found in women’s and LGBTTQI+’s autobiographies are closely linked to more global affairs such as politics, culture and society.

The body is a site of autobiographical knowledge –memory itself is embodied– and autobiographical narrators are embodied subjects, therefore life narrative is a site of embodied knowledge. Paul John Eakin argues “our lives in and as bodies profoundly shape our sense of identity.” (How Our Lives xi) Cultural discourses dictate which aspects of the bodies become significant: what body becomes visible, how and when it becomes visible, and what that visibility means. In this sense, the autobiographers are also embodied in the sociopolitical body, since a series of cultural tenets and attitudes have encoded the public meanings of those bodies and at the same time have founded and reinforced social relationships of power. Chicana authors and activists Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga draw attention to their lesbian body as a source for their political consciousness, elaborating their complex position as women, lesbians, biracial and multicultural Chicanas.

Since the 1980s, feminist critics and scholars have found in life narratives by women a wide, unexplored field that has allowed them to analyze the literary genre in relation to gender and sexual parameters. Elaine Showalter labeled them “gynocritics.” (“Women’s Time” 37) In using this term, Showalter includes the idea that these women belong to the American school of criticism, a school that aims to recover lost texts and to subvert the established literary canon. For their part, those scholars who build their work in a European philosophical, psychological, and/or linguistic intellectual tradition also find in autobiography fertile soil to explore gender issues. This is what Alice Jardine calls “gynesis.” (26) A considerable group of female critics have explored the ways in which women’s narratives of the self are different from the male written counterparts. Estelle Jelinek maintains in The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present (1986) that women’s autobiography shows a narrative discontinuity that is unique. Mary Mason claims that the female expresses her self through the other (207). Sidonie Smith argues that women autobiographies are constantly exploring the borders between the public and private (A Poetics 43). Smith denounces that life narratives by women have been silenced or segregated –often labeled as anomalies (A Poetics 40)– and that the only ones receiving the mainstream’s attention are those that imitate male models and therefore reinforce the erasure of women from the field (A Poetics 41). Susan Friedman conceives female autobiography as a space where a collective consciousness is exhibited (64). One can postulate the same for LGBTTQI+ texts, as it will be argued later on.

After French feminism established how “man” erased “woman,” French and American feminist theory has argued that the very term “woman” has altered, and even eliminated, the historical distinctiveness of many women. Thus, they search for a theoretical apparatus that allows for the affirmation of differences among women as well as of different voices within each individual woman. Françoise Lionnet uses the concept of metissage (248) to address this multiplicity, especially in relation to the postcolonial subject.

These cultural meanings that are assigned to particular bodies affect the types of stories people can tell, as it has been observed in the case of women autobiographers. Something similar happens in the case of the LGBTTQI+ authors. Until the last decades of the 20^th century, to speak of sex was to shame oneself. Only males that spoke about heteronormative sexual relationships found some reprieve. Some examples can be found of narratives about sexual encounters by women and LGBTTQI+ subjects, but unless they are confessional autobiographies in which they seek redemption –and even then, they might not be published–, these narratives either reproduced or are read as reproducing the identification of sexual freedom with society’s lower-classes. Thus women, and many men, were self-censoring about their bodies and their sexuality. Studies such as David Jackson’s Unmasking Masculinity: A Critical Autobiography (1990) carries out the double task of critiquing articulations of masculinity as well as reporting his findings on the social construction of his gendered and sexual identity.

Analogous to what happened in the case of life narratives by women, LGBTTQI+ narratives of the self make visible formerly invisible subjects. Oftentimes, these autobiographies are Bildungsromane in which the coming-out experience is recounted. In the majority of cases, LGBTTQI+ subjects address the cost of passing as heteronormative citizens and their efforts to be respected in their chosen sexual identities. In the beginning, these narratives of the self declare that their subjects have neither been represented, nor representable, in autobiographies. Because of this, LGBTTQI+ have been alienated twice when participating in the autobiographical act. This is the reason why they tackle their narratives from the standpoint of someone who speaks from the margins of autobiographical discourse. This raises a particularly conflictive relationship with the reader. Since autobiography is a public utterance, the LGBTTQI+ autobiographer speaks for both: the members of her/his LGBTTQI+ community as well as for the heteronormative subject. However, while addressing the latter, the writer manifests her/his position, and in her/his writing that s/he is conscious of the possible readings that her/his authorial discourse and reputation are subjected to. This way s/he projects onto the reader a series of cultural expectations with regards to the autobiographical narration. The autobiographer reveals the degree of self-consciousness of her/his position as writer who writes from a heteronormative genre through the dialogue with the reader, with that “other” to whom s/he is trying to explain and/or justify her/his life. By paying such attention to the reader, the autobiographer affects a change to the rigid nature of the genre.

Nevertheless, in recent years the texts that deal with sexual awakening have changed, and continue to do so, from an earlier narrative of victimization, loneliness, and secrecy to stories of living within a recognized social group and rejecting a marginalized, stigmatized identity. While feminist collections of essays, usually published by small, independent presses, have served as an archive of lesbian writing –This Bridge Called My Back (1983) by Moraga and Anzaldúa, and Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990), edited by Anzaldúa come to mind–, new directions in gay life writing came into the literary scene a bit later – Dan Savage’s The Kid (2000) or Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors (2002), among others. LGBTTQI+ autobiographies often develop from a crossroads of identities, for instance Fries’s Body, Remember (2003) intertwines the author’s identities as disabled, Jewish, and gay. This intersection of different identities is also present in the narratives of the self by US Latino authors. For instance, in Eminent Maricones (1999) Jaime Manrique narrates his identity as a gay Latino artist while interconnecting it with the lives of three other prominent Hispanic gay writers: Reinaldo Arenas, Federico García Lorca, and Manuel Puig. The Ortiz Taylor sisters collaborate in their narrative of life Imaginary Parents (1996) by piecing together words and artistic installations. Carmelita Tropicana, the alter ego of Alina Troyano, probes her identity as Latina lesbian performing artist in I, Carmelita Tropicana (2000). Two decades of Latino LGBTTQI+ narratives of the self have challenged prevailing discursive configurations of the non-heteronormative subject. Taking into account the shift in LGBTTQI+ autobiography, this book will discuss how and up to what extent the prevailing discourses are challenged in Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographies.

Blurring the distinction between essay and autobiography: performative identity and the ethical

Autobiography has been defined by the distinction of fiction and non-fiction, as well as by the difference between rhetorical and experiential first-person narration. Yet, such differences are products of culture and as such they might be portrayed differently. As a literary artifact, narratives of the self are also subject to developments in the literary system as a whole. The emergence and disappearance of other genres, as well as the use of new forms of narration, have an effect on autobiography as well. Popular features from earlier times –diaries and epistles, for example– make it possible for narratives of the self to adopt them as a way to express closeness, while textual strategies and structures associated with one particular genre might be appropriated by another –for instance, autobiographies such as the ones analyzed in this book adopt narrative strategies and structures characteristic of the essay. By the same token, when the novel adopted the first-person narrator as a way of granting realism to the plot, its presence alone ceased to be enough to discriminate autobiography from fiction and its use was no longer the prevailing feature in the definition of the genre. Moreover, the use of this autobiographical first-person voice adopted a subjective, less pragmatic, value. Direct observation, eyewitness accounts no longer appear as marked autobiographical features. On the other hand, autobiography has adopted strategies and techniques of other forms of discourse. Such is the case of the apology, which has become almost exclusively associated with the narratives of the self, leaving behind its original functions.

Despite the fact that the diversity of narrative techniques and strategies seem to point towards the notion that there is no intrinsically autobiographical forms, there are some common features that allow us to qualify a given text as autobiography, as it has been established in the previous section. One, the autobiographer is at once author, narrator and protagonist; that is, s/he is the source of the subject matter as well as the supplier of the structure of the text. Two, the events concerning the author are alleged to be truthful: regardless of their public or private nature, the reader is expected to accept the account as true. Three, the autobiographer proclaims to believe in what s/he contends. Regardless of whether the author sporadically breaks these characteristics or not, it is imperative that the reader understands the autobiographer to be responsible for meaning to meet them. As stated before, this is what Philippe Lejeune coined as the “autobiographical pact.” The act of self-imaging and self-evaluation by the author is understood to take place, and it is acknowledged as a kind of self-evaluation. Because readers are conscious of this, any amount and type of revelation, as well as their form of expression become central to the reading of a work perceived and understood as autobiographical. But the narrative of the self is also a construct, and from the manner in which an author manipulates her/his readers, and in the fashion s/he imagines her/his implied readership, the audience can extract inferences about the autobiographer’s interaction with others. Since identity is composed not only by self-perception, but also by our looking at others looking at us, and how we reconstruct and alter those views of the others about us, context is also of significance when reading autobiography.

Due to the significance of context, the concept of autobiography as the literary reproduction of one’s life has been replaced with the notion of autobiography as a performance; that is, the re-creation of the self in the time of writing. This evolution was already traceable in the early works by Georges Gusdorf, who asserted that autobiography “effects a true creation of self by the self” (44) and as a result readers have access to a “new and more profound sense of truth as an expression of inmost being.” (44) Because of the intended manipulation of the discourse by the author, in order to affect the reader as well as to build an apology or justify the protagonist’s actions, one must detach autobiography from the concept of truth, to which it was closely related originally. The early forms of autobiography stem from the Christian model of confession, and thus were fixed around the belief that what the author poured on the pages was the truth. If the text is considered a construct, this belief cannot be relied on. In fact, contemporary studies in narratives of the self reject the concept of autobiographical truth as something external to the self, something objectively verifiable, and replace it with a much more elusive definition. Autobiographical truth is an internal concept, created by the self. Truth, as alluded to in the previous section, becomes subjective rather than objective, and therefore the mechanisms of verification of truth become far more complex, if at all possible. This opens the flood gates to new considerations, among which the one that interests this study is that autobiography, when considered as an act of self-creation, becomes a rhetoric artifact.

Along those lines, Paul John Eakin maintains that autobiography is a form of self-invention that is being produced at the time of writing, and which is parallel to the person’s access to identity at the time of language acquisition. For Eakin “the writing of autobiography emerges as a symbolic analogue of the initial coming together of the individual and language that marks the origin of self-awareness.” (Fictions 213) Eakin, however, does not clarify what he means by that “symbolic analogue.”

Another reaction to the considerations that derive from the shift of emphasis in autobiography to the moment of its writing is that which centers on the control the reader has over the text. As already stated, this is a point of view upheld by Elizabeth Bruss, who asserts that autobiography functions as illocutionary acts. Philippe Lejeune also reflects on the role of the reader. To this regard, Paul de Man states that critics such as Lejeune maintain that “the identity of autobiography is not only representational and cognitive but contractual, grounded not in tropes but in speech acts,” (71) which turn the reader into a significant authority.

At the beginning autobiography was regarded as mimetic; then, with the shift from text-centered towards the notion of subject, de Man used the figure of prosopopoeia as a trope for autobiography. With the increased interest on the figure of the other, that trope changed. Scholars were aware that the writer of narratives of the self was cognizant of an implied reader and, therefore, the text was being seen as an address to the reader. For Paul de Man, “the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a de-facement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.”(81) This refutation of autobiography as mimesis aimed to restore a life implies that the genre is more than a simple restoration or recount of a life. Autobiography is seen now as a referentially-productive discursive practice. Narratives of the self provide life with form and meaning, constructing a meaning of life by means of refutable discourses. Therefore, autobiography is in the end a performative act, not a mere cognitive function.

Turning our eyes now towards the so-called minorities, when it comes to draw a markedly feminist autobiography, critics like Sidonie Smith, within the frame of Women Studies, also center the argument in the time of writing when they affirm that autobiography is an interpretative act of the past, and that because of its interpretative nature, this act is neither fixed nor completely recoverable from the present time of writing. One of the contributions of the feminist theories to the field of autobiography –and one which is particularly relevant to the so-called ethnic autobiographies– is the unending exploration of a variety of discourses, at times contradictory among themselves, that take part in the construction of feminine subjectivities. This is something that Smith underscores. In this sense, the creation of a history of subjectivities –promoted mostly by Michel Foucault– has produced a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the discourses that take part in the construction of said subjectivities through different cultures and different times. In other words, identity is not merely expressed in autobiography. Rather, it is created, constructed, at the time of writing by means of a number of collectively shared discourses

As in any performance, the autobiographical discourse is aimed towards an Other. Similar to what happens in the realm of the legal framework, prosopopeia in autobiography appears along apostrophe, another trope that has a key role in the ethic and discursive endeavors of the genre. Apostrophe is a form of beckoning the receptor’s attention –in this case the reader’s– which turns the text towards the other. Autobiography is, thus, a text written for the Other, rather than for the self. On the one hand, apostrophe brings out the self’s alterity and the creation of the self as a response to the Other. On the other hand, it reveals that autobiographical truth is not something that pertains to the past but to the present time of writing, and the future time of reading. Hence, what matters is not what is being said but the practice of saying it: the illocutionary act.

These perspectives bring about a political dimension to autobiography that gives narratives of the self a sort of ethical turn. Considering that the self is not autonomous, but rather it originates as a response to the other, that response results in responsibility towards the Other. This responsibility that constitutes the initial essence of the self is the core of ethics. This notion of ethics is devoid of morality; rather, it is the idea of ethics that Emmanuel Levinas brings forward: ethics as the domain of the other. By proposing that the other comes before the self, that it antecedes the subject, Levinas displaces the subject from the center. Nevertheless, this decentralization does not involve a neither a reduction nor a devaluation of the subject’s obligations and competences. As Levinas argues, even though deposed, the subject remains a singular entity because nobody else can respond for it. Nobody can take the place of another, and by the same token nobody can take responsibility away from, or for, any subject. In other words, the discursive dimensions of autobiography –as both an attempt at cognitive self-reconstruction, and as a performative act– that make it political are linked to the ethical dimensions of the genre.

This ethical dimension, the inexcusable need to respond to the Other, manifests itself in autobiography through the rhetorical figure of the apostrophe. It is this dimension too that allows for the blurring of the distinction that Lejeune established between autobiography and essay. Because the subject has been displaced from the center of the discourse, autobiographers necessarily write through the intervention of other discourses, be them scientific, philosophical, psychological, historical, sexual, religious, journalistic, etc. These discourses are located in the social context, and have become ingrained in the self. By not being visible, they are helped into becoming disguised as the personal truth of the writer. Autobiography goes beyond re-presentation of the self, or restoring the self from the past, and, like any essay, undertakes an interaction with the other, with the world, that orients the writing toward the future. It is no surprise, then, that autobiography can adopt the form of an essay.

The essay-like nature of the autobiographical text has been widely used in the development of a literary corpus by non-mainstream ethnic communities. As such, it allows the subject to expand his/her life to the community, as if the author-protagonist were a spokesperson, or rather an exemplary poster-child, for the whole community. As a result, the author can use her/his life to comment about what s/he considers crucial aspects for the community at large.