Panel: Autobiographical Practices and Self-Disclosure
Copanelists: Maria Ng and Eugene Stelzig
This paper explores the contemporary lyrical essay as a transitional form whose structure tends to follow that of prose narrative but whose imagistic and tonal allegiance lies with poetry. Lyrical essays mimic the compression and associative leaps typical of poems, but also take advantage of the contemplative or philosophical mode that is possible in the more spacious paragraphs of prose. But do we possess reading approaches that honor and unpack the significances that arise through the combinative nature of lyrical essays?
Poetry scholarship asks us to sideline, if not actively suppress, biographical detail in our unpacking of a text’s situation, and tends to encourage readings that resist the notion of a one-to-one correspondence between a poem’s emotional content and the author’s particular context. We expect that lyric poems are autobiographical, but differentiate between author and speaker, and thus do not fret whey they expose the most intimate details of desire, sex, loss, self-scrutiny—such is the stuff of provocative poetry. Nor do we expect poems to name others specifically or to abide by chronological order. Simply put, while poems may be autobiographical, they do not have to be “true.” But while we allow that prose autobiography operates within the constructed, fictionalized space of the page, we nonetheless maintain an expectation of truth-telling, and the autobiographical “pact” continues to mediate the way we approach the content of work designated as memoir. We want autobiographers to offer us lessons to live by, a fact that might tend to influence readerly response if their work seems unduly revelatory or self-involved.
What, then, are the rules governing self-disclosure in a lyrical essay? Does the “I” have a freer range of motion than that of a more strictly narrative prose memoir? Can the lyrical essay incorporate a “you,” without naming or developing that figure for readers? How do we approach essays that do not so much tell their stories as simply hold them in suspension? With close study of authors Cheryl Strayed, Melora Wolff, Lauren Slater, and Jane Creighton, this paper will seek to uncover ways in which we might combine different strategies for reading poems and prose memoirs in order to attend to the hybrid nature of lyrical personal essays.
Susannah Mintz is Associate Professor of English at Skidmore College. She is the author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (2003) and Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (2007). Her teaching and research areas include seventeenth-century literature, life writing, the personal essay, and disability studies.