Reading Autobiography

collectivity? The relationship of an individual to history and time? What kinds of public roles seem important and privileged?

The emplotment of autobiographical narratives, then, can be described as a dense and multilayered intersection of the temporal and the geographic. By teasing out the complex ways in which life narratives are organized,

This list could go on and on, taking us through cultural institutions, state bureaucracies, nonstate organizations, friendships, cross-cultural encounters, communities, media, virtual reality. Global culture multiplies the possibilities for both coaxing and coercing multiple life stories.

Life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body. As Paul John Eakin argues in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, "our lives in and as bodies profoundly shape our sense of identity" (xi). The ability to recover memories, in fact, depends upon the material body. There must be a body that per