Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today

Notes

notes Chapter 1. The Academic Memoir Movement 1. In addition to those referenced in this book, a partial list of humanities scholars in the United States who have published memoirs from the late 1980s to the present includes Michael Awkward, Sharon Cameron, Joy Castro, Mary Ann Caws, Henry Louis Gates, June Jordan, Annette Kuhn, Toni McNaron, Josie Mendez-Negrete, Nancy Miller, Reynolds Price, and Robert Stepto. The majority are literary critics, located in English or literature departments, sometimes with affiliations in women’s studies or African American studies. 2. One of the few studies to discuss memoirs by academics extensively is Nancy Miller’s 2002 But Enough about Me. However, Miller’s focus is primarily on women’s experiences of aging, friendship, and parent-child relationships. Moreover, as a writer of memoir herself, Miller defends the genre against charges of narcissism by using “personal criticism” and stressing memoir’s capacity to establish textually based moments of recognition and identification for women. My approach includes a critique of the limitations of reading for identification, as I instead foreground structural issues of power in relation to memoirists’ institutional location (see, especially, chapter 2). Aside from Miller’s book, Aram Veeser’s Confessions of the Critics (1996), Diane Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Francis Murphy Zauhar’s The Intimate Critique (1993), and Freedman and Frey’s Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines (2003) are widely read collections that have served more to evidence academic autobiographical writing than to reflect on and theorize critics’ autobiographical turns. Recent calls for papers (including those for an interdisciplinary conference titled “Academic Autobiography, Intellectual History, and Cultural Memory in the 20th Century” to be held at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, in March 2009) on academic memoir suggest the critical tide may be turning. 3. This reception articulates with the polarized reception that memoir has received in nonacademic venues, where responses range from Patrick Smith’s denouncement in the Nation of memoir’s focus on the “purely personal” or William Gass’s satirical attack in Harper’s on “Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism” to New York Times Magazine’s applause for “The Age of the Literary Memoir” as the success of a form of writing that is democratic and accessible. 4. My own entry into this project is perhaps symptomatic of this. I finished my first academic book with my tenure secured, with the luxury of a teaching-free 282 notes to chapter 1 summer stretching before me. Too well interpellated into academe to spend the summer reading novels and hiking, and not yet ready to engage in the research needed to develop a new project, I picked up a few academic memoirs. These, it seemed to me, occupied an in-between territory, a way to catch without becoming immersed within academic currents. I approached the memoirs with my critic’s radar turned low and with a combination of curiosity, idleness, and exhaustion not deep enough to warrant a turning away from the academy and its concerns altogether. 5. For analyses of the conditions in the present-day academy, see Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory, Brennan’s Wars of Position, Miyoshi’s “Ivory Tower in Escrow,” Readings’s The University in Ruins, S. Slaughter and Leslie’s Academic Capitalism, or Washburn’s University, Inc. 6. See, for example, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La frontera or Moraga’s Loving in the War Years. 7. The same holds true for memoir’s role in dominant U.S. culture, wherein the obsession with individual stories and entertaining media personalities arguably substitutes for, and fatally distracts from, analysis of larger stories that need telling. A recent example of this can be found in the 2006 controversy surrounding James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. When the investigative Web site the Smoking Gun (www.TheSmokingGun.com) exposed its lies, the resulting media storm stood in striking contrast to the relative silence over the release of the Downing Street Memo, exposing how the Bush administration had marshaled made-up intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. 8. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also provide a useful account of critics who have remarked on the use of the personal in the academy. Critics whose work they address include Smith in Moving Lives and Rita Felski, Suzanne Fleischman, and Herman Rapaport. 9. Perusal of Amazon.com sales figures supports my point that memoirs do not ensure crossover appeal. On July 7, 2005, whereas Edward Said’s Orientalism ranked 8,977 in...