September 7, 2009

On the Scholar as First Person

On the Scholar as First Person 1

Bhasha Chakrabarti

Cynthia G. Franklin, an English professor at the U. of Hawaii-Manoa, takes a closer look at the underappreciated academic memoir.

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Bhasha Chakrabarti

Cynthia G. Franklin, an English professor at the U. of Hawaii-Manoa, takes a closer look at the underappreciated academic memoir.

By Kacie Glenn

It's easy to poke fun at professors who depart from scholarly writing to tell the stories of their lives. Their forays into the first person not only cause them to forfeit any claims to objectivity but also can lead to accusations of egotism and suspicions of ulterior motives, not to mention infelicities of writing. Even the most eloquent and insightful academic memoirs are, by nature, ungainly hybrids of the scholarly and the subjective. In Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory,

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