Take My Word. Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women

"An exciting, original contribution to American Women's Cultural Studies. . . . Goldman challenges even poststructural views of the author and reminds us how women found ways to subvert traditional scripts in representing themselves and their relation to their cultures."--Barbara T. Christian, author of "Black Feminist Criticism" "Always attentive to historical and discursive contexts, Goldman looks for the pressure points of these nontraditional narratives where the discursive call to speak as a representative of a collectivity--what she describes as the ethnographic imperative--gives way to the impulse to 'self-distinction'--what she describes as the individualizing logic of self-possession. In doing so she compels theorists of autobiography to rethink the elasticities of autobiographical utterance by means of a negotiable 'I'-'We' continuum. She compels us, that is, to rethink conventional understandings of genre. Her argument is incisive, her readings nuanced, her prose lucid."--Sidonie Smith, author of "Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century"