English 640 – Spring 2007

Autoethnography Assignment: Parameters for the Draft Due February 28

Here’s what we’ll collectively look for when you share your autoethnography work-in-progress.

1. Anecdotes. These serve both invention and structuring. As invention devices, they help you recall specific moments in your literacy learning, and they give you a particular point in time from which to begin thickening the cultural, economic, social, or political context that surrounds and enables the moment. As structural devices—recall the models provided by Pandey and Brodkey; here you can see how the anecdote actually organizes the narrative—so anecdotes may become the backbone or skeleton (backbones are so linear) of your autoethnography. In class, let’s remember to ask how anecdotes might pull you toward linearity and progress narratives, and how they might work against these conventions in order to expand the critical space.

2. Oral/print/digital. In treating the oral, print, and digital—remember that these categories do not develop sequentially (1, 2, 3) but rather may develop simultaneously, overlap, merge, or--one may suddenly surge ahead while others lag, etc.

3. Visual element. What are your planned visuals and how do they function in your autoethnography? Ditto sound or movement.

4. What are your plans regarding the “canvas” or canvases on which you’ll mark your autoethnography? Alternatively, what are your plans re the medium or media by which you’ll assemble autoethnographic pieces? (I think these are two different metaphors for composing, yes? –mark or assemble?)

5. How are you using the Hawisher and Selfe matrix?

6. Where specifically do you move from the anecdote to the social/political/economic/cultural context within which this anecdote takes place? In other words, how to you move from the auto to the ethno?

7. Where’s the critique of the literacy systems within which you emerge as a writer/reader? This is the negative critique that Brodkey insists is the critical element of an autoethnography and that is visually encoded in the Guaman Poma writing referenced by Pratt.