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Reviewed by:
  • The Rise of the Memoir by Alex Zwerdling
  • Marianne Hirsch (bio)
Alex Zwerdling. The Rise of the Memoir. Oxford UP, 2017. 238 pp. ISBN 978-0198755784, $90.00.

Over twenty-five years ago, I had the good fortune to spend a productive year at the National Humanities Center working on a book about family photos. Although the year was meant to be devoted to individual research and writing, the Center encouraged fellows to form seminars on areas of common interest. Some of us welcomed the chance to explore the attractions and the pitfalls of the personal academic writing with which scholars had begun to experiment, particularly in feminist circles. Nancy K. Miller's recently published Getting Personal commented, in part, on the personal writings of a number of colleagues at Duke who had joined in a formidable writing group experimenting with these new forms. We hoped and in part succeeded to be in conversation with Duke colleagues like Cathy Davidson, Alice Kaplan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jane Tompkins, but we also wanted, together, to determine the value of the personal in scholarly writing. And, indeed, our discussions were marked by strong passions and heated disagreements.

Reading Alex Zwerdling's rich discussions in The Rise of the Memoir was, for me, to be immersed in these urgent debates once more, though at a very different moment. Zwerdling begins The Rise of the Memoir with his recollection of that National Humanities Center seminar, stressing the discomfort some of us felt when challenged to account for our personal stakes in our projects. One of the organizers of our seminar, Zwerdling was a particularly skeptical reader of personal scholarship. What was gained by "getting personal"? I remember him asking. Is it not a distraction to focus on the scholar rather than the scholarship? What exactly do we need to know about the individual writing a book about family photographs, or about the genre of autobiography? And how much do we need to know: when are we saying too much when we situate our projects in the story of our lives, and when too little? Is personal writing self-indulgent, or worse, narcissistic?

In The Rise of the Memoir, Zwerdling comes back to some of these questions a decade later, as he traces the evolution of a genre that originates with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. In Zwerdling's rigorous and illuminating discussions, the memoir is not so much the product of a writer's engagement with life writing as it is a long-range, sometimes lifelong, and mostly contingent and provisional "project." Memoir projects can stretch across numerous attempts and several books. The examples that Zwerdling reads in detail, ranging from Rousseau to Maxine Hong Kingston by way of Edmund Gosse, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, and Primo Levi, all share a number of characteristics that help define the memoir project. They each hover on the edge between the "I" and the "world," that is, between [End Page 393] an assertion of individual uniqueness and a keen consciousness of the circumstances to which the individual is both subject and responsible. These memoirists worry and wonder about their responsibility to others—to family members whose lives they inevitably expose, to contemporaries whose fates they share, and to their community or nation. What authorizes the memoir-ist to speak for others?

The Rise of the Memoir traces these hesitations through all the texts it discusses by means of meticulous archival research into the papers of these writers. Through published and unpublished materials, Zwerdling shows that even as it responds to a compulsion to narrate the "I" in time, the memoir project tends, for most writers, to be halted by a cycle of hesitations, false starts, and difficulties, by reconsiderations and revisions, by shame and guilt. Life writing is a neverending process of self-questioning, and the "I" shifts and changes along the way in a series of experimental performances of self. As Zwerdling writes, "The compositional history of these memoirs seems almost as absorbing as the final products, because it allows us to understand just what was at stake for the writer whose story it is, who not only owns, but owns up...

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