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Barbara Rodríguez. AutobiographicalInscriptions: Form, Personhood and theAmerican Woman Writer ofCohr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 228p. Becky Jo Gesteland McShane Weber State University As I began this book I was intrigued by Barbara Rodriguez' choice ofautobiographies : Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Hisaye Yamamoto's "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara," Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, Adrienne Kennedys People Who Led to My Plays, and Cécile Pineda's Face. I found the text selection a lively grouping and drought that the book seemed likely, as Rodriguez says in her first sentence, to enter "into the current, increasingly lively revisiting and repositioning ofautobiography studies" (3). IfI was put offby die jargon ofthis first sentence, I didn't let on—I simply dismissed my response as a preliminary reaction to writing more sophisticated than the writing produced by my undergraduate students. The introduction fed my curiosity. Here, Rodriguez provides an essential history ofautobiography theory, reviewing the key critical movements and their most influential theorists. She then explains her use ofthe prosopopoeia trope, "a trope preoccupied widi giving face and voice to an historical abstraction of a nation or a people" (7), and outlines the theories most important to her project: Sidonie Smith's critique ofpatriarchal influences on autobiography, Leigh Gilmore's history of the signature, Barbara Johnson's analysis ofautobiography across generic boundaries, King-Kok Cheung's strategy ofsilence, and Françoise Linnet's study ofcultural métissage. So far so good. Then I encountered a thesis: "I illustrate, finally, the ways in which the shifting presumed marginalities recorded in these narratives illuminate issues ofsubject construction that have a very challenging centrality to the structures and conventions of the genre, and to the autobiographical project itself" (7). I wrote "huh?" in the margin and pressed on. But I had happened upon a characteristic of Autobiographical Inscriptions: the close readings of texts, primary and secondary, are acute but the theoretical conclusions are obtuse. In the chapters that follow, Rodriguez reads texts across historical periods, across cultural contexts, and across artistic media and she reads them well. But in almost every chapter I suffered the same frustration over and over again. When it comes time for synthesizing, for pulling it all together, Rodriguez' language fails her. For example, at the end ofChapter 2, on Rowlandson andJacobs, she provides only one concluding sentence, which seems to contradict the very mission ofthe 120 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2001 Reviews book—to revisit and reposition autobiographies by American women of color. Here, in an almost-paragraph-length sentence, she claims that Rowlandson's "descriptions ofthe Native American, her own acts ofidentification widi the Other, and her struggle for subjectivity . . . frame the efforts that HarrietJacobs and other later American women autobiographers of color make to redefine that space as their own" (95). I don't think Rodriguez intends to reposition all ofthe autobiographies she surveys within the frame ofawhite woman's experience—she certainly does not do this in her book. And yet, rather than a careful synthesis of the two autobiographies, she hurries to a conclusion that obscures the significance ofher analysis. Chapter 3, on Kingston and Yamamoto, provides a formal conclusion but it revolves primarily around Kingston. In fact, the bulk of the chapter is about Kingston. On the surface this imbalance is not necessarily bad but it made me think that Rodriguez privileges certain texts over other, perhaps lesser-known, texts. (The same imbalance exists in the Rowlandson/Jacobs chapter, where she devotes much more space to Jacobs.) At times, as in Chapter 4 on Silko and Kennedy, I wondered why she pairs the autobiographies at all, since she rarely compares the two texts. The pairings often seem arbitrary and the links between chapters, ifthey exist, seem superficial. Fortunately, the Conclusion combines the autobiographies in more meaningful ways. As she analyzes Pineda's Face, Rodriguez weaves the other texts in and out ofher argument, synthesizing and distilling meaning. At one point she states that "like the authors treated in the rest of the project, Pineda constructs a text that...

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