Study Questions for Nancy Miller, "Getting Personal: Autobiography as Cultural Criticism," Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991: 1-30.

This essay is intended to initiate our discussion about cultural criticism and location.

How does Miller define ''personal criticism"?

Miller distinguishes between the personal and the autobiographical criticism. How?

What does she mean on (page 2) by ''the constitution of critical authority and the production of theory''?

Miller defines some of the forms of "personal criticism" with examples. What is the nature of the various forms she describes?

Define ''typology''? ''Poetics''?.

Why does Miller hesitate to develop a poetics of ''egodocuments" that might be "confessional, locational, academic, political, narrative, anecdotal, biographematic, etc.?
Both underlined words are neologisms. Why & what might they mean?

Miller reveals that to an English colleague, 'being personal'' is simply being American. Discuss this idea of ''the personal'' as a national characteristic. How would a Canadian think through the issue of the ''personal''? Which ''Canadian"?

An essay by Jane Tompkins called ''Me and My Shadow'' has been criticized as reinscribing ''bourgeois feminism and bourgeois individualism -- the very idealist and essentializing strains which so many theorists have tried to dismantle." What is bourgeois feminism and individualism? (Note we will discuss this in class and share perspectives with those of us with training in political science.)

Jane Tompkins' essay focuses on the effects of the splitting off of 'private life' and the 'merely personal' from conventional academic discourse and the ''public-private hierarchy that is a founding condition of female oppression." What is at stake in this hierarchical split? Think of examples that confuse the public/private split?

French cultural critic Roland Barthes writes in "The Death of the Author" (quoted on page 8 of Miller's essay): "To read is to desire the work, to want to be the work…. To go from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work but to desire one's own language." Think about your own reading & writing in relation to this idea of desiring ''one's own language." What happens when you make the transition from reading a cultural text to writing about it?

Jane Gallop, the author of Feminist Charged with Sexual Harassment, comments that Barthes "authorized my own push out of objective, scholarly discourse into something more embodied"(9). What would be key for you to think about as an ''embodied'' writer of cultural criticism?

When Afro-American critic Barbara Christian thinks about reading and writing, she comments that she must think back through her ''black sisters and brothers [who] would not even have gotten in the library, or [if they did] they'd be dusting the books'' ''like the parlour maid in Jane Eyre. (quoted on page 10)." In thinking about how her daughter's interruptions of her reading and writing, she notes how her child knows that ''writing is even more private than reading, which separates her from me and has many times landed her in bed before she wanted to go." Consider the issues of ''location,'' reading and writing, in these two comments.

Gallop writes how she thinks ''through autobiography: that is to say, the chain of associations that I am pursuing in my reading passes through things that happened to me." What matters in this statement?

The rest of the essay raises important questions that we will discuss in terms of our own critical reading and writing:

• What do we do with the problem that personal narratives validating female ''experience" tend to rely on "the abstraction of a re-depersonalized" we women": do all women share a single personal narrative? (p16)
• "How can we speak personally to one another and not be self centered?"(Tompkins quoted on page 17)

Miller comments (p14-15) that while white mainstream feminists wrote ''on the whole like everyone else'' during the 1980s, ''experiments in autobiographical or personal criticism…were also going on and constituted a contrapuntal effect, breaking into the monolithic and monologizing authorized discourse." Define: contrapuntal, monolithic & monologizing authorized discourse. By contract, what is the nature of autobiographical criticism according to Miller?

What is Barbara Johnson saying in her comments from Gendered Subjects quoted near the bottom of the page. 15 and why is she saying it? Why has "personal experience tended to be excluded from the discourse of knowledge"? Why has ''the realm of the personal itself …been coded as female and devalued for that reason? What are the effects of this exclusion and devaluation?

The discussion of ''identity politics'' and ''bourgeois self-representation" is central to some of the ways intellectual work has been read in newspapers and magazines that investigate (often superficially) what it means to ''appropriate'' the voice of others. What does it mean for you to speak ''as'' your ''self'' and for you to speak ''for'' someone else?

Adrienne Rich writes that ''every mind resides in a body"? (18)
Is this comment self-evident or instructive?

Consider whether and how personal criticism ''embodies a pact, like the 'autobiographical pact' binding writer to reader in the fabulation of self-truth, that what is at stake matters also to others." What is the risk of this pact?

Miller lists some of the drawbacks of personal criticism which is ''only as good as its practitioners. At its worst, it runs the risk of producing a new effect of exclusion, the very 'chumminess' of the unidentified 'we' (25). How might you avoid this exclusivity?