hooks IWA

Pre-reading
     Autobiographies are life histories written by oneself. They differ from memoirs in that it is really an overview of that person's entire life (the big life experiences- the ones that shaped them into the person they are) rather than an in-depth look into one area of their lives. I think a proper autobiography should include childhood experiences and family dynamics, adolescence, and then post-18 experiences. Relationships are important areas of exploration as well.

Summary
    In bell hooks's text "Writing Autobiography," she recalls her struggle with writing her own autobiography. Initially, hooks explains that she wanted to write the autobiography to erase her old, unpleasant past experience and identity and create a brand new one. Throughout the process of writing--of remembering--hooks learns that autobiography is a writing style of both fiction and nonfiction--biomythography--which changes the relationship one has to the past. Ultimately, hooks learns that writing about the past does not erase it but reshapes it into something meaningful.

Synthesis
   By writing about autobiography, hooks's piece most resembles Donald M. Murray's "All Writing is Autobiography." Both pieces argue that autobiogaphy is not nonfiction: memory and the act of remembering are unreliable and subjective. hooks calls this process "biomythography." In both this piece and the Malcolm X excerpt, autobiography as a genre acts as an outlet for people to reveal their unique experiences--people who otherwise lacked a voice or an outlet: a black woman growing up in the segregated south and an illiterate black man. Furthermore, hooks's desire to create a new identity recalls McCloud's "masking effect" from "The Vocabulary of Comics."

QD
1. This tragic statement from hooks means that she wanted to completely erase her painful past. I can't even imagine a past so painful that would make someone want to build a new, separate identity, completely removed from that period of her life. hooks doesn't reveal what made her past so tragic, but she doesn't need to; I don't think this fact takes away from her reliability as a narrator; she invites her reader to imagine what could have happened to her with this information: she was a black woman who grew up in the Jim Crow south.

4. Initially, hooks wanted to "kill the self", that is, erase her old identity and create a new one. The process of writing her autobiography does not do this. Instead of an erasure of the past, hooks writes that writing her autobiography "enabled [her] to look at my past from a different perspective and to use this knowledge as a means of self-growth and change in a practical way" (hooks 180). Rather than "kill" her old identity, she looks upon the past as a building block for her current self.

AE
4. I think my students and I will be able to relate to the act of writing for a discourse community. Like Allen says, I don't think anyone ever feels particularly welcome in a community, so really, every time you write an academic piece, you are putting on a mask to use McCloud's terms or I guess creating a new identity. Going along with Allen, every time we "imitate" we adopt a new identity.

Thoughts
I love bell hooks and cannot wait for Wednesday's discussion.