Reading American Women\u27s Autobiography: Spheres of Identity, Spheres of Influence

When I returned to graduate studies in 1994 to a field I defined as English after an absence in the early 1990s, I faced the fact, immediately and shockingly, that the original drive and skills I had toward reading, enjoying, and analyzing literary texts were no longer viable. Indeed, I was soon to discover, close readings of novels, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose were passe, and had been since the 1960s. Where had my MA program and I been? In fact, generic categories themselves had begun to shake and tremble under the pressures of vague yet powerful entities called deconstruction and poststructuralism. It was a postmodern world when I got back into the game, which meant for me not only that the rules had changed, but also that the idea of there being any game or rules at all was a Western, classist, racist, sexist, bourgeois assumption that could cause rifts in departments and fights at intellectually elite cocktail parties..