This thesis examines the role that dialogue and community play in the autobiographical enterprise and argues that autobiographer and community are dialogically interrelated. The central idea that governs Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Smaro Kamboureli's in the second person, and Minnie Bruce Pratt's "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," is this: life-writing cannot be divorced from dialogical relations because living cannot be divorced from dialogical relations. Accordingly, if it is impossible to conceive and define ourselves without reference to other selves, it must be equally impossible to write our life-stories without reference to others. Hence, the process of "self-invention" or "self-fashioning" typically associated with the autobiographical project must be reconsidered within the larger frame of history and heritage, community and collaboration.

Autobiographical narration is a form of expression that is thematically orientated towards the self and self-disclosure and can be viewed as a technique not only of self portrayal but also self-assurance. Autobiography was once seen to be the discipline of renowned men who recounted the achievements and course of their lives; however recent discourse and treatment of the genre has centred on the potential for a fluid relationship between fact and fiction, concepts of multiple selves, and enquiry into the broad social importance and potential of the genre itself. Feminist counter theories and the differing approaches and perspectives of contemporary artists are considered within the context of an expanded interpretation of autobiography. / Autobiography in art reveals a number of features in common with literary autobiography and this study moves freely between both literary genre theory and contemporary visual art theory. These theories include consideration of aspects of narcissism, gender, nostalgia, confession, truth, metaphor, imagination, memory, fiction, therapy, and critical distance, and historical perspectives and philosophical questions concerned with the self and subjectivity. / In the visual arts autobiography is also considered through 'expression theory', which focuses on the expression of emotion in art. This section acknowledges the use of emotion within my own work and also draws upon (without specific reference to), the current prevalence of emotive expression in the contemporary music scene, a trend expressed as 'emo'. In this essay emotion is discussed both within and outside a visual art context (including a brief historical perspective informed by the philosophy of R.G.Collingwood). / A specific focus on metaphor and critical distance through contemporary feminist perspectives and opposing long-established concepts of metaphor are discussed with reference to specific artists and cultural theorists. / This research concludes with a specific focus both on my own work and the art works of other artists who, with various and divergent approaches, use emotive and autobiographical methodology within their work / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-257). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 1992. / Reprint. University Microfilms order no. UMI00362140.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 1992. / Reprint. University Microfilms order no. UMI00362140.

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 296-307).

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My doctoral research is a critical and creative investigation into the dialogic relationship between memory and imagination through creative life writing and its potential for personal freedom. It looks at what happens when writers enter into a creative relationship with their life stories, focusing on the potential of creative life writing for loosening narratives and self-conceptions that mould identity. I explore my topic in three different ways: through (1) qualitative research into the effects on participants of a series of creative life writing workshops I facilitated at a hair salon/barbershop serving a culturally diverse community of people of African, Caribbean, Asian and European heritage; (2) my own creative life writing, Skipworth Street's Bonfire Night, written in response to the qualitative research; and (3) a case study of Lionheart Gal, a book of creative life writing produced by Sistren Theatre Collective in 1970's Jamaica. My explorations of these three components are informed by two different but related bodies of literature: theory and practice of creative life writing for personal development and literary and political writings from the African Diaspora. Four main observations from the research are explored: (i) the practice of creative life writing enabled the writers at the salon, and myself through my own writing, to ‘access and objectify' our personal material (Hunt 2001) and, by doing so, to distance ourselves from life-held narratives and open up psychic space for looking at ourselves from different perspectives; (ii) through the process of creative life writing the writers discovered a sense of self that was multiple and embodied; (iii) the notion of finding a voice in the creative writing process was intrinsic to the participants' experience of finding personal freedom, allowing them to speak in the workshop with greater authority; (iv) creating a safe-enough environment for creativity to take place was essential to enable participants to move with confidence into their own personal space and writing. The research takes up Sistren's director, Honor Ford-Smith's (1986) call for a ‘unity between aesthetic imagination and the social and political process'. She believed that for real political change to take place there had to be an ‘altering' or ‘redefining' of socio-political structures and that, for this to happen, we needed to unlock ‘the creative power of rebel consciousness' buried deep within our own stories. In bringing these ideas into the present, the thesis draws on Paul Gilroy's (2005) suggestion that the idea of ‘multiculturalism' should be revived by ‘conviviality', which, he says, better reflects the complex issues of diversity and difference in present urban societies. The creative life writing workshops in the salon/barbershop created a space for putting conviviality into practice: by redirecting participants' attention to their feelings and emotions, the workshops enabled them to recognize and negotiate difference and multiplicity rather than conforming to fixed hegemonic ideals. Skipworth Street's Bonfire Night explores key concepts informing and emerging from my research that I either explored consciously in my own creative writing or that arose spontaneously through it. I was able to challenge my own tacit assumptions and life held narratives, as unconscious material emerged that enabled me to look at myself, as well as my research, from a broader perspective. This study offers new perspectives to emancipatory processes located in the use of creative life writing for personal development as well as to socio-political discourses of identity. It has practical applications for schools and youth and community groups, as well as adult education.

Abstract This research paper examines the ways in which the autobiographical impulse is constructed in selected artworks of Tracey Emin (b1963-) and Claudette Schreuders (b1973-). It is situated within contemporary discourses around notions of the self, namely postmodernist, feminist and post colonialist frameworks. This critical discussion of notions of the self, as evidenced in these selected artworks, leads into discourses of Authenticity, of Histories, personal and collective and of the role Identity formation plays in the performing self. In conducting this research I have drawn on a wide range of theoretical frameworks including philosophy, psychoanalysis and literary theory, including magical realism. The first part of my study presents the theoretical frameworks of Authenticity, History and Identity regarding the autobiographical impulse. The second section of this paper examines the selected works of Emin and Schreuders. I chose these two artists because of their different strategies in performing themselves rather than their similarities, which allows for an interrogation of a broader framework of contemporary artistic practices. The concluding chapter examines my practical artwork during the period of my Masters degree. My work comes from an autobiographical base and I create a ‘self-portrait’ through my accumulation, production and display of objects. My exhibition took the form of an installation whereby I created an uncomfortable atmosphere through various methods including stimulating the olfactory sense in a predominant way.