Jill Ker Conway Critical Essay | Critical Review by Joyce Antler

Critical Review by Joyce Antler

SOURCE: A review of When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography, in Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 3, December, 1999, pp. 318–19.

In the following review, Antler offers a positive assessment of When Memory Speaks, calling the collection “insightful.”

Intended for a general audience, this trim volume [When Memory Speaks] argues that autobiography as a narrative form is based on cultural scripts that offer readers symbolic reflections of their own inner lives. Conway believes that, unlike other genres, autobiography has become a universal medium because it addresses complex problems of personal identity using language nonspecialists can comprehend.

Despite the familiarity of many of the texts Conway discusses, her concise readings are always insightful. Over all, she finds more constancy than change in the genre's common forms—for example, the quest, the romance, the odyssey. Thus the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity is inscribed in later periods as...
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