In the era of identity politics, whose is the "I" of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal , Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing "as a" feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature. Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.
NANCY K. MILLER is the author of "What They Saved," the story of how she reconstructed her family's missing past from a handful of mysterious objects passed down from her father. The strange collection--locks of hair, a postcard from Argentina, a cemetery receipt, letters written in Yiddish--moved her to search for the people who had left these traces of their lives and to understand what had happened to them. As Miller slowly pieced together her family portrait and assembled a genealogical tree, she felt connected in unexpected ways to an immigrant narrative that began in Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, when her ancestors headed for the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the end of her decade-long quest, Miller started to imagine the life she might have had with the missing side of her family. Suspended between what had been lost and what she found, Miller finally comes to terms with the bittersweet legacy of the third generation--tantalizing fragments of disappeared worlds.
Nancy K. Miller has written, edited or co-edited more than a dozen volumes, including Getting Personal, Bequest and Betrayal, and But Enough About Me.
