1. For typical examples of the formalist approach to autobiography, see Fleishman, Hart, Lejeune (in his early books and essays), May, Pascal, and Spengemann.

2. For some idea of the volume and the variousness of the production of autobiographical texts in France alone, see the biennial bibliographies edited by Lejeune.

3. Germaine Brée spotted this discrepancy between theory and practice ten years ago. She discerned in Roland Barthes, André Malraux, and Michel Leiris, all three would-be practitioners of a new mode of "anti-autobiography," a counter-current or resistance linking them to a line of traditional autobiographers of the self stretching back to Montaigne. break

4. The situation is politicized, moreover, by the implication of these theories of personality in thinking about social order in the West. To read Lang on Olney and Spengemann, or Ryan on Lejeune ("Self-evidence"), or Olney on French poststructuralism ("Autobiography" 22-23), is to recognize the extent to which there is a veritable politics of identity informing the study of autobiography today.

5. See Gusdorf and Weintraub for further commentary on the cultural conditions favoring the rise of autobiography.

6. In recent years a remarkable number of autobiographies by Indians have appeared--by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and others. Brian Swann and Krupat himself have promoted the development of this new phase of autobiographical writing by Native Americans in their collection I Tell You Now .

7. For insight into the relativity of cultural models of identity, see Olney ( Tell Me Africa ), M. Brewster Smith, Gusdorf, and Weintraub.

8. Krupat's new book, A Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon , is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

9. The play of cultural politics uncovered in Krupat's investigation of Native American autobiography is strikingly confirmed by William L. Andrews's account of the constraints imposed on slave narratives by white northern editors and sponsors. In her reconstruction of Saint Teresa of Avila's struggle with her male confessors for the right to tell the story of her religious experiences in her own way, Kathleen Myers demonstrates that gender must be included alongside factors of class and race in our understanding of the influence of a dominant culture on any act of autobiographical self-expression. Collaborative autobiography, facilitated by the technology of the cassette recorder, is, of course, widely practiced today by journalists, oral historians, and ethnographers, and Daphne Patai's interviews with contemporary Brazilian women have prompted her to recognize the inevitable implication of even the most apparently disinterested and well-intentioned scholar in the exercise of power that characteristically structures bicultural autobiographical collaborations. The most comprehensive articulation of the theory and practice of collaborative autobiography today is Philippe Lejeune's study "L'autobiographie de ceux qui n'écrivent pas" ( Je 229-316). break