Embodied Criticism: A French Lesson (original) (raw)

for Susan Shapiro What happens as scholars of various disciplines increasingly write in the first person? (1) What does it mean for us to place ourselves, our embodied and historicized selves, in our work? I am interested in what transpires when we do this not just in our introductions, prefaces, or acknowledgements, but throughout an entire text. Given this turn to the first person point of view, what are we to make of the narrating of self, the self narratives that are present in our work and in the works of others? What comes to pass as these narratives become sedimented, when we can see the layers of self narratives presented over time? How do we write and rewrite our stories knowing that at least some of our readers already know some of these earlier tellings? With these questions in mind, I want to think about how we read the traces of the lives of other writers in an author's work and what the traces tell us, and to consider how we account for changes in our own positions...