Robillard
RT 105/ Fall 2003
2-3 pages double-spaced
Due Tuesday, November 25 by 4:00

First, let me let you in on my own thinking in terms of the way I designed the sequence of this course. Autobiography in composition studies is often taken up as “the personal narrative,” an assignment, usually the first of the semester, that asks students to recall a significant event in their lives—a difficult decision, a life-changing moment, etc. Such personal narratives are generally seen as a “warm-up” to more academic writing. I believe, however, as I've said many times in class, that autobiographical writing is far more complicated than such an assignment acknowledges. I also believe, as you know, that it's important for students to understand the way that the Author/student binary informs so much of the work about writing in the university.

The claim I've been working with all semester is this: Autobiographical writing exposes the Author/student binary (by making students aware of who gets published and who does not) and it can function to challenge the cultural figure of the author as autonomous, original, proprietary, and moral.

As you think about revising your autobiography, I'd like you to revisit the work you've done with autobiography, cultural scripts, and authorship theories. Please read back through some of the discussions we had earlier in the semester as represented in our class notes. Read your homework assignments and my comments on them. Reread your analysis of autobiographical cultural scripts. Reread your argument paper. Use “The Method” on some of this work. Which strands of work have most directly affected your understanding of yourself as writer or author?

In 2-3 pages, I'd like you to reflect on the work of this course by imagining how your revised autobiography might incorporate some of the ideas we've been developing. Here are some questions to jumpstart your thinking (I do not intend for you to answer them all):

•  What do you want to change about your autobiography and why?

•  How does Barthes' claim about the author's death and the reader's birth affect your understanding of what it means to write an autobiography? How might this affect the choices you make as a writer?

•  How might your autobiography circulate? Who else will read it? Will you share it with family? With friends? How does your conception of audience affect how you revise your story?

•  Are you giving any characters pseudonyms? Why or why not? How do proper names function in autobiographies?

•  Which cultural scripts are you now more conscious of as you write? What plans do you have for challenging those scripts?

•  Are there any authors you can think of who have directly or indirectly influenced the writing of this piece? How might you give those authors credit? Do they deserve credit?

•  How has your autobiography—an assigned piece of writing—been affected by the parameters of this course?