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The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony

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In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges.

First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.

ISBN-13: 9781501770777

Media Type: Paperback(with a new preface)

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Publication Date: 07-15-2023

Pages: 186

Product Dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Age Range: 18 Years

Leigh Gilmore is the author of several books, including The #MeToo Effect, Tainted Witness, and (with Elizabeth Marshall) Witnessing Girlhood. Her public feminist scholarship appears in The Conversation, Public Books, and WBUR's Cognoscenti.

What People are Saying About This

Kevin E. Quashie

The Limits of Autobiography is as foundational as a book gets. Gilmore theorizes late-twentieth-century first-person narrative aesthetics as a calculus among trauma, representation, and language. Her thinking is lyrical and astute, and still crackles two decades later. What an indispensable fundament for engaging autobiography, memoir, and autotheory.

Alicia Partnoy

Leigh Gilmore's brilliant analysis of limit-case narratives offers a blueprint to advance our understanding of survivors' writings, and courageously validates creativity as a force to tell our truths.

Evan Watkins

Leigh Gilmore easily negotiates disparate fields of scholarship yet speaks significantly to all of them—from poststructuralist and feminist theory to medical studies of trauma. Her arguments are theoretically sophisticated and engaging, while her thinking about the individual texts is lucid, arresting, and new.

Judith Butler

This book remains an extraordinarily important contribution to trauma theory. Leigh Gilmore is a brilliant theorist of narrative experimentation, showing how writing about trauma compels interdisciplinary and cross-genre work. She challenges us to rethink many of the more accepted conventions regarding autobiographical writing, insisting on the partial and complex aspects of trauma narrative as well as the role of experimental forms for survival.