Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts

By Nancy K. Miller

Book Overview

In the era of identity politics, whose is the I of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life.
Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing as a feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature.
Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415903246
• ISBN13: 9780415903240
• Release Date: July 1991
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

useful intro to personal criticism

The first chapter of this book, "Getting Personal: Autobiography as Cultural Criticism" is worth the whole book. This is a manifesto for personal criticism, that both gives an overview of the kinds of writing that can be called personal criticism and the problematics of the concept. Some feminist theory is densely theoretical, while other feminists argue that we must "turn our back on theory". Miller disagrees with the latter, while arguing for a personally grounded criticism that is not necessarily overtly autobiographical but that is always *intense*. I also found this chapter valuable in finding other examples of personal criticism as well as references to other discussions of this method.The other essays in this collection are sometimes inspiring as examples of personal criticism, but I have to admit I'm more interested in the technique of writing (and writing seriously) than in the topics she writes about. You may find the opposite.