Sociology

Business

Politics

History

Operating system

Literature

Advertising

Political science

Poetry

Narrative

Subversion

Foregrounding

Trope (literature)

Section (typography)

Theme (computing)

Computer science

Biography

REVIEWS 435 What is a bit troublesome, for me, is the book's organization. At first, the arrangement seems to be thematic, with sections providing brief histories of the feminist issues related to the literature discussed. Part one, for example, presents the work of Nancy Chodorow, Jean Baker Miller, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Adrienne Rich foregrounding discussion of the role of mothering, particularly the mother as caregiver. The substantive texts ofthat section are by Alice Walker, Gloria Steinern, Vivian Gornick, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, among others. A second section, however, focuses on what Braham calls "mythmaking ," woman writers' uses of history/herstory. Because this part works differentlyÂ—having different topics included under what one reads as a governing tropeÂ—the reader is less sure that the opening section is meant to establish a pattern. The unpredictability of sections can be unsettling, particularly when Braham moves from theme and content to attention to the readerÂ—Part four is titled "The Caught and Connected Reader"Â—and to the writerÂ—Part five, "Self-Authorization," is a study of the woman as less literary writer. Had the author been more explicit about the informality of her work, about the fact that this book is itself a kind of autobiographical, though scholarly writing, the reader might have been better prepared for its randomness. Some of her segments (the sections on the biographies of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, for instance) are difficult to relate to her announced matrix. Others (die section about writers of color; the pages devoted to women writing about illness) take off into areas that cry out for more example and explanation. Simply juxtaposing these often interesting readings does not provide enough structure: the reader misses the authorial voice providing kinds of connection. Again, the trope of "conversation" does not give readers adequate means of seeing why Braham is choosing the texts she does, or why she has arranged them as she has. Might Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals or Carole Ione's Pride of Family fit in the mother-as-caregiver section as well as where they do occur? Would discussion of Nancy Mairs' writing work better in the section on self-authorization than as a segment of what seems to be illness writing? Where can we find the inevitability, the sense of Tightness, that belongs in a well-structured (and convincing ) study? In any writing, the reader's complicity with the text, her acceptance of the explicit and implicit rules of the writing, is itself crucial for the rapport that makes "reading" one of our essential personal actsÂ—regardless of gender, genre, or theme. Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jeanne Perreault, Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1995. 153 pp. $44.95 cloth, ISBN 0-8166-2654-5; $17.95 paper, ISBN 0-8166-2655-3. Katherine Mansfield eloquently pondered in her journal in April 1920 whether perhaps "the rage for confession, autobiography... is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the 436 biography Vol. 19, No. 4 dead leaves and through the mould." So too for Canadian author Jeanne Perreault . Knowledgeable as her book shows her to be in contemporary theory, the notion of self persists: an "old-fashioned word" that she refuses to surrender. Self, she observes, has been the basis on which feminist women at large have resisted male authorities' definitions and designations of them, and feminists of color have countered inappropriate generalization extrapolated from white women to all women. Though the self, Perreault knows, may be unstable, fluid, and problematical, the self remains a reality of autography: writing "whose effect," in her definition, "is to bring into being a 'self which the writer names ÎŠ,' but whose parameters and boundaries resist the monadic" (2).The recurrent presence of the "I" in feminist discourse continually reaffirms the belief that the personal is political. Those who say "I" are not merely thinking about themselves . Perreault contends that a new kind of ethically informed subjectivity has been evolving. The tests of feminist autography articulate an energy...

&lt;i&gt;Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography&lt;/i&gt; (review)

&lt;i&gt;Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography&lt;/i&gt; (review)

<i>Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography</i> (review)