Sidonie Smith

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.

With the memoir boom, life storytelling has become ubiquitous and emerged as a distinct field of study. Reading Autobiography, originally published in 2001, was the first comprehensive critical introduction to life writing in all its forms. Widely adopted for undergraduate and graduate-level courses, it is an essential guide for students and scholars reading and interpreting autobiographical texts and methods across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts. Thoroughly updated, the second edition of Reading Autobiography is the most complete assessment of life narrative in its myriad forms. It lays out a sophisticated, theoretical approach to life writing and the components of autobiographical acts, including memory, experience, identity, embodiment, space, and agency. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore these components, review the history of life writing and the foundations of autobiographical subjectivity, and provide a toolkit for working with twenty-three key concepts. Their survey of innovative forms of life writing, such as autographics and installation self-portraiture, charts recent shifts in autobiographical practice. Especially useful for courses are the appendices: a glossary covering dozens of distinct genres of life writing, proposals for group and classroom projects, and an extensive bibliography.

An engaging look at women writing on the go-and what they tell us about female identity.As technological advances increased the ease, speed, and reach of transportation, more and more women took to the air, to the road and the rail, and headed for points elsewhere. As they mastered new modes of mobility and then narrated their journeys, these women travelers left cultural ideas of femininity as sedentary, subordinate, and constrained in the dust. In Moving Lives Sidonie Smith explores how women’s travel and travel writing in the twentieth century were shaped by particular modes of mobility, asking how the form of travel affected the kind of narrative written.Alexandra David-Neel journeying on foot across the Himalayas; Robyn Davidson on her camel in the outback of Australia; Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Beryl Markham climbing into the cockpit of their airplanes; Mary Morris riding a train from Beijing to Berlin; Irma Kurtz taking a Greyhound into the bellies of American cities and towns-of these and other women, Smith asks: What do they make of their travels? How do they enact the dynamics of and contradictions in the drift of identity? Are they defined by the experience-or do they define the meaning of a particular mode of transport in new and different ways, and in doing so, disentangle travel from its masculine logic?Unique in its focus on the relationship of women in motion, technologies of motion, and autobiographical practices, Moving Lives will interest readers across a broad spectrum of disciplines, as well as those who are simply intrigued by travel narratives.

Women, Autobiography, Theory is the first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women’s autobiography, drawing into one volume the most significant theoretical discussions on women’s life writing of the last two decades.The authoritative introduction by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson surveys writing about women’s lives from the women’s movement of the late 1960s to the present. It also relates theoretical positions in women’s autobiography studies to postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist analyses.The essays from thirty-nine prominent critics and writers include many considered classics in this field. They explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe, including testimonios, diaries, memoirs, letters, trauma accounts, prison narratives, coming-out stories, coming-of-age stories, and spiritual autobiographies. A list of more than two hundred women’s autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography of critical scholarship in women’s autobiography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

From resumes to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling has become a central theme of American culture. Visual media offer possible lives through soap operas, talk shows, and "lifestyle programming", and newspapers and magazines frame their stories as "personality profiles". This text explores a variety of occasions during which people consume personal narratives. This collection aims to expand our understanding of how we negotiate and commodify identity.