The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? Like, same.” Immediately, Shapland recognized these as love letters between the two women. Shapland recognized McCullers’ name, noting that having never read any of her books, McCullers’ titles nonetheless “always struck a chord with. While working in the Ransom Center, known for holding David Foster Wallace’s and Norman Mailer’s papers, a scholar requested that Shapland pull letters between 20th century literary It-Girl, Carson McCullers, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Lovingly researched and written, My Autobiography cracks the normative bounds of literary scholarship and shows us what kind of knowledge production is possible when the researcher drops the veneer of “scholarly objectivity” and makes herself fully present in the research process. Born out of her internship as a frustrated PhD student at the University of Texas’ renowned Ransom Center, Shapland’s book is also a work of scholarship.

My Autobiography blends Shapland’s own memoir with a biography of McCullers - an “(auto)biography,” if you will. It’s also probably the only book on my list that’ll be inviting enough to read in one sitting. Fortunately, as it turns out My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a truly expert reconfiguration of the autobiographical, as well as, biographical form. My next rite of PhD school is passing my prelim exams, which basically means reading dozens of books on autobiographies with the hopes of bamboozling my committee into believing that I am, indeed, an autobiography expert.Īs any good academic might (some call it “strategic,” others “lazy”), I signed up to review Shapland’s book because the paradoxical title made me think: Oooh, incredible opportunity for double duty, I can both review this and put it on my prelims list. Now, I know these facts about the autobiography’s place in scholarship because I - like Jenn Shapland, author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers - am slowly clearing the hurdles of an R1 doctoral program. Yet, even with Gusdorf’s introduction, it turns out there was still one major “limit and condition” to the academy’s embrace of autobiography: it would be another several decades before the autobiographies of women were given any serious consideration. Sometime in the 1950s, in an essay called “The Limits and Conditions of Autobiography,” the French philosopher and critic Georges Gusdorf introduced the academic world to the study of autobiography, a genre previously considered too frivolous for academic research.

The autobiography of carson mccullers