Panel 11 Questions

The first question we might consider for the readings in this panel derives from the topic and is political and canonical: whose life gets written, and how we as readers and scholars define and delimit the notions of "life" and "writing" in the early period. Several texts being introduced by our panelists do not immediately come to mind as representative of colonial autobiography. Do and How do these particular texts challenge the conventional definitions of autobiography in general, and the so called classical autobiographical writings as they have been defined and read in the early period--texts like Franklin's Autobiography, for example, which seems to dominate and define the genre. How does a reading of some of the texts we are considering here change our conventional understanding of "autobiography" or "personal narrative," and represent alternative knowledges and alternative conceptions of the self? How do they encourage a rereading of texts considered representative of early American life writing?

The second major question derives from the very purpose of this conference: bridging the gap between early American texts in English and Spanish, and.is necessarily comparative: how do we understand the linguistic and cultural differences and similarities between lives, experiences, and textualities in English and Spanish works? What do we need to know about specific literary and cultural conventions to read these texts fruitfully in themselves and in dialogue with each other? How can we make them accessible to our students, and yet insure that they retain an opacity which indicates their local, historical and cultural specificity--a specificity, as Doris Sommer suggests, which is not always or entirely open to complete translation. Is a vital experience of texts sometimes the indigestible or inscrutable bits that go unexplained? In other words, this opens on to the broader and pressing question of how do we teach texts in translation and across languages and cultures?

Finally, the last question we might consider is interpretive: what do these texts tell us about the various lives lived in the early period, in relation to central issues like colonization and transculturation, the formation, maintenance and negotiating of selves, an emerging "American" identity, and especially the various gender, religious, imperial and ethnic discourses that intersect in this period, to shape and constrain the textual production and narrative trajectory of life writing. What new knowledges are suggested in these texts that can enrich our presentation of new world writing?