Cirrus@Austlit

As an almost gluttonous reader of memoir and a scholar interested in just about any form of life writing, I am grateful for the rich set of perspectives, including those on performativity, offered over the last several decades by autobiographical theorists. They have, without a doubt, legitimated my literary gourmandising, as well as helped me refine my critical appetites. Since you can probably hear the caveat coming, I'll just come out and say it : as a practitioner - personal essayist and memoirist - I am somewhat less comfortable with theory in general and not really comfortable at all with what I take to be the most orthodox expression of performativity as expressed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, nor quite at ease with even the more modulated versions as expressed by Paul John Eakin and others. The crispist articulation of perfromativity's essential premise is from Sidonie Smith who, in response to Butler, reiterates her view that the interiority or self that is said to be prior to the autobiographical expression...is an effect of autobiographical storytelling' (qtd in Smith and Watson 214). Eakin's position is slightly more hesitant: 'The self of autobiographical discourse,' he writes in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves 'does not necessarily [emphasis mine] precede its constitution in narrative' (100). ' (Author's introduction)