ABSTRACT
Traditionally, autobiography has been seen as a genre closely allied with Western masculine and bourgeois constructions of the individual, a genre associated with the notion of a coherent self capable of truthfully narrating the development of that self as a representative individual. However, contemporary theorists of autobiography challenge this view of the genre. These critics work on two fronts: the rereading of canonical, traditional autobiography from a poststructuralist perspective that emphasizes the textuality of the genre, and the analysis of how autobiography functions as a mode of self-representation that authorizes and legitimates certain narratives and subjects and throws suspicion and doubt upon others. Feminist critics have been particularly interested in how the genre limits truthtelling in women’s autobiography: how truth, self, and experience are defined through gendered cultural contexts that often limit subjects’ ability to tell their story.1
