"It's the same person who feels and who discourses about epistemology. The problem is that you can't talk about your private life in the course of doing your professional work."
-- Jane Tompkins, "Me and My Shadow"
The tendency to disembody authors in print, while powerful, does not always dominate. Fissures have developed in the scheme, some instigated by editors and publishers, some by academics themselves. First, as authors grow more prominent, editors often indulge them in a photograph on the book jacket and/or in sharing information in their bio that goes beyond the name-rank-affiliation formula. Then too, authors include acknowledgments in their books in which they enjoy more liberty to express themselves, sending greetings and thank-yous to professional acquaintances, personal friends and loved ones. (I am reminded here of a delightful passage in the acknowledgments of my thesis mentor's first book, in which she thanks a friend for his "incomparable chicken curry.")
More important to this inquiry into authorial representation is the movement initiated in the mid-1980s to inform professional scholarship with personal narrative and experience. Feminists, multiculturalists, and others have led the effort, and several excellent collections on personal narrative and autobiography have been published in the last decade. Jane Tompkins is an important figure in this discussion of the personal and the professional. In her article, "Me and My Shadow" (1989) she identifies the problem:
"There are two voices inside me.... These beings exist separately but not apart. One writes for professional journals, the other in diaries, late at night. One uses words like "context" and "intelligibility," likes to win arguments, see her name in print, and give graduate students hardheaded advice. The other has hardly been heard from.
...The dichotomy drawn here is false -- and not false. I mean in reality there's no split. It's the same person who feels and who discourses about epistemology. The problem is that you can't talk about your private life in the course of doing your professional work. You have to pretend that epistemology, or whatever you're writing about, has nothing to do with your life, that it's more exalted, more important, because it supposedly transcends the merely personal. Well, I'm tired of the conventions that keep discussions of epistemology, or James Joyce, segregated from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart. The public-private dichotomy, which is to say, the public-private hierarchy, is a founding condition of female oppression. I say to hell with it. The reason I feel embarrassed at my own attempts to speak personally in a professional context is that I have been conditioned to feel that way. That's all there is to it" (Tompkins 25).
Tompkins and others advocate the integration of personal reflections into professional scholarly writing, thereby toppling the dominance that professionalism has traditionally held over the personal. Woven into Tompkins' response to a colleague's paper, a response that self-consciously echoes conventional academic discourse at times ("The essay provides feminist critics with an overarching framework for thinking about what they do.... It allows the reader to see women's studies as a whole, furnishing useful categories for organizing a confusing and miscellaneous array of materials" [Tompkins 26]), are memories from high school, reactions to the Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas movie Gunfight at the OK Corral, and, most significantly, several introspective moments. And, Tompkins is careful to note, mentioning things personal does not require employing the "I" pronoun. Indeed, sometimes the author need not identify her own involvement with the issues at hand, says Tompkins; "[the abstractions and issues] are already personal for me without being personalized [by the author] because they concern things I've been thinking about for some time, struggling with, trying to figure out for myself" (Tompkins 36).
Clearly, the emphasis that Tompkins and others place upon autobiography in scholarship causes a fissure in the academic convention of disembodying authors. Tompkins resists such restrictions, insisting on em-bodying herself through use of personal anecdote, mood and sentiment in constructing her contributions to scholarship. Her arguments on behalf of autobiography furnish a good transition to a discussion of electronic journals published on the Web that have, in their own way, confounded the conventional dichotomy between professional and personal.
previous page || next page