| Description |
In the early eighteenth century, philosophies of personal identity emerged that sparked debate among those who believed it consisted in fluid consciousness and those who believed it consisted in fixed substance. Modernists have adopted the view that personal identity consists in Enlightenment notions of a fluid, yet unified, consciousness. In the postmodern world, consciousness is philosophically effaced altogether. Postmodernism views personal identity as a culturally constructed notion. The practice of writing autobiography is an important site of continuing debate about personal identity. Autobiography has often been viewed as a method of discovering the self. But if the self is dead, as postmodern theory asserts, then autobiography must become a means of viewing cultures that create it. By investigating and enacting autobiography, this thesis intends to uncover cultural biases that inhibit and promote change. First, this investigation focuses on two autobiographies of marginalized men and criticisms of them. It shows how autobiographies function as attempts to ground the self in the norms of the culture, or to liberate the self from confmes imposed by the culture. The criticisms operate as cultural policing mechanisms that try to pull the texts in the opposite political direction. Continuing this investigation, I compare these autobiographers' texts and corrective criticisms of them to personal narratives based on my experiences and criticisms from authoritative figures socialized in male values. My narrative reveals discord similar to theirs, and its analysis suggests common negative responses to the Enlightenment self's prescribed unified identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that these vivid discomforts can be explained by examining the competitive social ideologies that are inculcated through different educational apparatuses. On the playing field and in the classroom, these ideologies act to preserve hierarchical discrimination at the expense of the individual's self esteem. In sum, autobiography cannot be viewed as a means of discovering the self, but must rather be viewed as a means of discovering how the culture functions to preserve dominating beliefs. |
