The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony

by Leigh Gilmore

Overview

Memoirs in which trauma takes a major—or the major—role challenge the limits of autobiography. Leigh Gilmore presents a series of "limit-cases"—texts that combine elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory while representing trauma and the self—and demonstrates how and why their authors swerve from the formal constraints of autobiography when the representation of trauma coincides with self-representation. Gilmore maintains that conflicting demands on both the self and narrative may prompt formal experimentation by such writers and lead to texts that are not, strictly speaking, autobiography, but are nonetheless deeply engaged with its central concerns.

In astute and compelling readings of texts by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson, Gilmore explores how each of them poses the questions, "How have I lived? How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. Challenging the very boundaries of autobiography as well as trauma, these stories are not told in conventional ways: the writers testify to how self-representation and the representation of trauma grow beyond simple causes and effects, exceed their duration in time, and connect to other forms of historical, familial, and personal pain. In their movement from an overtly testimonial form to one that draws on legal as well as literary knowledge, such texts produce an alternative means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.

About the Author:
Leigh Gilmore is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Self-Representation, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501770777
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2023
Edition description:	with a new preface
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Leigh Gilmore is the author of several books, including The #MeToo Effect, Tainted Witness, and (with Elizabeth Marshall) Witnessing Girlhood. Her public feminist scholarship appears in The Conversation, Public Books, and WBUR's Cognoscenti.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Limits of Autobiography
1. Represent Yourself
2. Bastard Testimony: Illegitimacy and Incest in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina
3. There Will Always Be a Father: Transference and the Auto/biographical Demand in Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart
4. There Will Always Be a Mother: Jamaica Kincaid's Serial Autobiography
5. Without Names: An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body
Conclusion: The Knowing Subject and an Alternative Jurisprudence of Trauma

What People are Saying About This

Kevin E. Quashie

The Limits of Autobiography is as foundational as a book gets. Gilmore theorizes late-twentieth-century first-person narrative aesthetics as a calculus among trauma, representation, and language. Her thinking is lyrical and astute, and still crackles two decades later. What an indispensable fundament for engaging autobiography, memoir, and autotheory.

Alicia Partnoy

Leigh Gilmore's brilliant analysis of limit-case narratives offers a blueprint to advance our understanding of survivors' writings, and courageously validates creativity as a force to tell our truths.

Evan Watkins

Leigh Gilmore easily negotiates disparate fields of scholarship yet speaks significantly to all of them—from poststructuralist and feminist theory to medical studies of trauma. Her arguments are theoretically sophisticated and engaging, while her thinking about the individual texts is lucid, arresting, and new.

Judith Butler

This book remains an extraordinarily important contribution to trauma theory. Leigh Gilmore is a brilliant theorist of narrative experimentation, showing how writing about trauma compels interdisciplinary and cross-genre work. She challenges us to rethink many of the more accepted conventions regarding autobiographical writing, insisting on the partial and complex aspects of trauma narrative as well as the role of experimental forms for survival.

Editorial Reviews

Gilmore offers astute and compelling commentaries in relation to the social and psychic forms within which selected autobiographers told their personal stories in literate and unconventional ways. Informative, thought-provoking chapters comprise this unique and highly recommended contribution to the literary study of the autobiography.

The Bookwatch

Through theoretically nuanced, lucid, and insightful readings, Gilmore demonstrates the ability of narrative to transform trauma, to speak to a certain truth about the relationship between trauma and identity that goes beyond the exigencies of accuracy and objectivity that pertain to a juridical contect.... Any reader interested in the myriad interpenetrations of violence, the law, identity, family, and life writing will find much to admire in this impressive study.

Biography

Leigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography is a fine addition to the body of excellent recent work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all working in the mental health disciplines.... The writing is extremely fine throughout, and the book is a rich cornucopia of literary and psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here.

Metapsychology Online Review

Leigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography is a fine addition to the body of excellent recent work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all working in the mental health disciplines.... The writing is extremely fine throughout, and the book is a rich cornucopia of literary and psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here.

-- "Metapsychology Online Review"

Through theoretically nuanced, lucid, and insightful readings, Gilmore demonstrates the ability of narrative to transform trauma, to speak to a certain truth about the relationship between trauma and identity that goes beyond the exigencies of accuracy and objectivity that pertain to a juridical contect.... Any reader interested in the myriad interpenetrations of violence, the law, identity, family, and life writing will find much to admire in this impressive study.

-- "Biography"

Gilmore offers astute and compelling commentaries in relation to the social and psychic forms within which selected autobiographers told their personal stories in literate and unconventional ways.... Informative, thought-provoking chapters comprise this unique and highly recommended contribution to the literary study of the autobiography.

-- "The Bookwatch"

From the Publisher

Through theoretically nuanced, lucid, and insightful readings, Gilmore demonstrates the ability of narrative to transform trauma, to speak to a certain truth about the relationship between trauma and identity that goes beyond the exigencies of accuracy and objectivity that pertain to a juridical contect.... Any reader interested in the myriad interpenetrations of violence, the law, identity, family, and life writing will find much to admire in this impressive study.

Biography - Susannah B. Mintz

Leigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography is a fine addition to the body of excellent recent work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all working in the mental health disciplines.... The writing is extremely fine throughout, and the book is a rich cornucopia of literary and psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here.

Metapsychology Online Review - Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

"Leigh Gilmore easily negotiates disparate fields of scholarship yet speaks significantly to all of them—from poststructuralist and feminist theory to medical studies of trauma. Her arguments are theoretically sophisticated and engaging, while her thinking about the individual texts is lucid, arresting, and new."

Evan Watkins