The Personal Essay as Autobiography: a Gender and Genre Approach

Abstract

The personal essay as autobiography is the generic landscape I will traverse along these lines. Within that field, I do a gender-oriented comparative analysis of four books that can be read as autobiography, although they really are written as personal essays, a genre of life writing described as “a self-trying-out; a testing of one’s own intellectual, emotional, and psychological responses to a given topic.” I explore recent hybrid autobiographical volumes written by Spanish Rosa Montero (La loca de la casa), Canadian Margaret Atwood (Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing), Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez (Brown: The Last Discovery of America) and European-born, Jewish-American George Steiner (Errata: An Examined Life). Bringing into my trans-national analysis the works of two men and two women allows me to do a reliable comparative reading of a number of genre/ gender oriented issues.