Education and Autobiography: The History, Practice, and Pedagogy of Autobiographical Narrative in Higher Education

“Education and Autobiography: The History, Practice, and Pedagogy of Autobiographical Narrative in Higher Education” explores the intersections of autobiography and education through three major areas: history, creative practice, and pedagogy, each of which is investigated in one of three papers that comprise this dissertation. The first paper, “Programming the Personal,” narrates the disciplinary history of creative nonfiction between the years 1930-2015, detailing how creative nonfiction rose to become a major genre track in graduate creative writing programs. The second paper, “Distance and Desire,” essays the experience of the educated split self and the “feeling” of education by integrating personal narrative with analyses of Tara Westover’s Educated and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory. The third paper, “Stretching the Truth,” explores the limitations of teaching autobiography with pedagogical aims external to literary analysis, such as instilling critical thinking skills or teaching religious experience. These papers are guided by several inquiries: What does it mean to be educated when education fundamentally changes who we are? Which autobiographers have taken up this deep change of education, and how have they narrated it? How is writing autobiographical narrative itself an educative endeavor? What educative possibilities emerge from teaching autobiography, and with them, what limitations? How is it that there is space carved out in our institutions of higher education—a place where we tend towards the objective and the scholarly—where we prioritize teaching the art of personal narrative? By probing this variety of relationships between education and autobiography, this dissertation offers new ways of thinking about how autobiography informs our conceptions and experiences of education, and how education informs our appreciation and practice of autobiography.