Autobiographical Theory

Before the 1970s, virtually no autobiographical scholarship existed in the field of curriculum studies. In the realms of literature and literary criticism, classical Western autobiographies for a number of years had focused on public figures and were, for the most part, written by men. Works that did theorize autobiography primarily treated men's life writing. Until the mid-1970s, little work was done in literary studies, especially, on theorizing women's autobiographies other than through formalist categories, such as history and genre. And those theories most often were grounded in liberal feminists' notions of essentialist, universal, singular, and unitary conceptions of “woman,” “gender,” and “voice.”

However, by mid-20th century, autobiography as both literary genre and curriculum discourse in U.S. curriculum studies paired well [Page 62]with existential-phenomenological theories, partly because autobiography was fertile ground for considering ways to reconceptualize curriculum conceptions and studies from a focus on “external,” behaviorally oriented learning objectives and predetermined subject-matter content to investigations of students' and teachers' “inner” experiences and perceptions of their lived curriculum.

Since the late 1980s, autobiographical theories have been and continue to be influenced especially by feminist poststructuralist, transnational, postcolonial, and queer theories, to name a few anti-foundational perspectives and philosophies. These theories enabled curriculum theorists and researchers, from various epistemological and ontological positionings and agendas, to consider divides between fact and fiction as well as the impossibilities of autobiography as a “self-expressive” act; to challenge possibilities of presenting a life “objectively”; and to examine how shaping forces of language prohibited any simple attempts at “truth,” reference, or accurate and unmediated representations of “self” and “others.”