List of sources used

Websites:
With Liberty and Justice for All

Collete Gaiter: "Space/Race"
Caitlin Fischer: These Waves of Girls
Joyce Dallal's Finding Home
April Somboun's 'Have you found your home?'
George Legrady and narrative interfaces
Beyond Writing - Automemoirs
Glass Houses
ASCI.org Digital 99 awards -- Karasic
Karasic's home page

Print articles

Adams, Timothy Dow. "Design and Lie in Modern American Autobiography." From Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Dow deals with the interesting question of truthfulness and lies in autobiography. He questions whether it is important for an autobiography to be "true" and looks at such hybrid genres as the fictional autobiography.

Diamond, Arlyn. "Choosing Sides, Choosing Lives: Women's Autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement." In American Women's Autobiography. Ed. Margo Culley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
This article, chapter 10 in American Women's Autobiographies, deals with the particularly difficult task in many cases of writing about the civil rights movement that these women lived through and worked in. What the women call "Our story" is told as a hopeful document, that someone else will read and understand, and perhaps take inspiration from and act as radicals. In this sense, these autobiographies are important; from a theoretical view however they are also interesting, as well as personally relevant for many. As Diamond says in her introduction, "As producers and consumers of our own and others' memories we are all shaped by our experiences of domination and resistance as we have lived them in our society."

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A reader. Ed by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. p. 392.
Stuart Hall is a post-colonial theorist; this piece is excerpted. It's about the hybridity of cultures in a post-colonial world and how one finds identity within this. Hall uses his own experiences of growing up in the Black diasporic Caribbean and then moving to London to make his points.

Holte, James Craig. The Ethnic I: A sourcebook for Ethnic-American Autobiography. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
In this book, Holte explores the American literary tradition and particularly the ethnic tradition, concentrating on the medium of autobiography. He writes, "The conjunction of literary choice and cultural influence is especially evident in autobiography" (p. 2). The quote I used in my essay is from the introduction.

hooks, bell. excerpt from "Talking Back." in Writing Women's Lives. Ed. by Susan Cahill. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. p. 451.
bell hooks is an African-American feminist theorist; "Talking Back" is her autobiography. In it she talks not only about her own life but about the nature of autobiography and its potential political aspects.

McKay, Nellie Y. "The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black American Women's Autobiography." in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
McKay looks primarily at historical Black Women's autobiography, starting with the story of Harriet Jacobs, aka Linda Brent. McKay primarily argues that Black women must construct their narrative selves differently from either Black men or White women. Thus, while Black autobiographers in general focus on their race as identity, Black women must make a hybrid of both race and gender as they tell their story.

Acknowledgements

This essay was written as the final project for English 498G at the University of Washington, Fall 2002. It's online because this seemed like a suitable and appropriate format to address an online site. Thanks for ideas from my classmates and professor George Dillon; thanks for help with the HTML from Prof. Dillon and Jon 'Sheer' Pullen. I have only scratched the surface of examining online autobiography with this essay -- there are many brilliant sites out there worth exploring. All text copyright 2002 Phoebe S. Ayers unless quoted; all images copyright Carmin Karasic unless otherwise specified. Please email me with any comments.