Tracing the Autobiographical, and: Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (review)

These two collections of essays have appeared as part of the Life Writing Series published under the editorial guidance of Marlene Kadar. Since 1995 the series has established itself as a major forum for showcasing primary sources and theoretical work in the field of autobiography studies in Canada. Taken together, the two recent volumes of life-writing criticism herald exciting new developments in the field and set up high standards of scholarship.

International in scope, Tracing the Autobiographical unsettles the generic boundaries of auto/biography (the slash consistent with a programmatic effort to blur the lines) and offers a variety of innovative reading strategies and interdisciplinary approaches. As Kadar and Jeanne Perreault explain in their introduction, the authors of the essays seek the traces of self-representation in unexpected autobiographical sites, 'unlikely' documents and places, from which they try to extract textualized identities and histories of individuals or groups. All pieces are solidly grounded in feminist theories of subjectivity and the body and 'poststructuralist and postcolonial theories of identity and agency, language and self-representation.'

Emphasizing relationality, the twelve essays in Tracing the Autobiographical can be organized around the overriding thematic motif of material and metaphorical location, which functions, among other things, as a geographical and generic locus of production of autobiographical discourses; as a medium; as a cultural context; or as a complex intersection of gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, and other markers of difference in constructions of subjectivity. In the first three papers focused on new digital and electronic media, Helen M. Buss explores the development of agency in a teenage girl's memoir of sexual abuse by an Internet predator; Linda Warley reads personal websites as a form of life writing; and Gabriele Helms examines the relationship between television reality shows and our cultural values. The next three authors go to theatrical, domestic, and geographical spaces respectively, with Sherrill Grace looking at what happens to the auto/biographical pact when it takes place on stage; Kathy Mezei studying the effects of 'home' in the representations of life and identity in such media as biography, photographic art, and memoir; and Susanna Egan tracing Daphne Marlatt's autobiographical poetics of exile in the long poem about Steveston, both a place and a community. The third group of essays examines life-writing texts such as legal documents, life stories, memos, investigative reports, and generational memoirs that collectively interrogate the nation state as a site of legal oppression of Aboriginal peoples (Cheryl Suzack), a propaganda machine (Jeanne Perreault), and an agent of institutionalized sexism (Bina Toledo Freiwald). The last three pieces attend to trauma and memory. Thus Christine Crowe examines inscriptions of maimed and tortured bodies in 'The Stolen Generations,' narratives by Aboriginal women in Australia. Adrienne Kertzer uses the concept of postmemory to problematize second-generation responses to the Holocaust, articulated through such sites as a gallery exhibit, adult memoirs, and children's literature. Finally, Marlene Kadar retrieves for historical memory the experience of the Devouring, a Romany term for the Holocaust, from traces and fragments such as a Nazi deportation list, archival reports, photographs, and song laments that must stand in for life stories of non-literate communities.

Reading these contributions is not only an intellectual feast, but also an ethical encounter with lives lived by people who have left only fragments or traces of themselves. The concern with ethics is present throughout in this volume, as an ethical call to respond to lost or marginalized subjects of history (an ethics of memory), and as a self-reflexive questioning of both what we read and how we read (an ethics of reading). For the authors, writing about the auto/biographical takes on a dimension of an act of witnessing. Resonating with the themes of 'ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope,' several of the essays present a testimony of pain and erasure that leaves the reader...