Journal Facts

Journal
Auto/Biography
ISSN
0967-5507
Volume
12
Issue
2

Article Facts

Title
`Dream(e)scapes': a Poetic Experiment in Writing a Self
DOI
10.1191/0967550704ab008oa
Author
Susanne Gannon (University of Western Sydney, Australia, S.Gannon at uws.edu.au)
Pages
107-125

Article Links

`Dream(e)scapes': a Poetic Experiment in Writing a Self

Susanne Gannon (University of Western Sydney, Australia, S.Gannon at uws.edu.au)

DOI: 10.1191/0967550704ab008oa

Abstract

Feminist poststructuralist approaches to research can authorize different ways of working with different types of texts in search of insight into the discursive constitution of subjects, including the (sexed) self. Such texts draw attention to their own construction and analysis of them tends to multiply the `meanings' that might be on offer. In this paper I perform a risky in(ter)vention into autobiographical writing in order to trouble realist conventions of self-writing, particularly in feminist autobiographical textual practice. An autobiographical self is constructed and put under erasure, in the form of a poem. The data that I represent here in poetic form were collected from recorded fragments of dreams. Privileging dream data leads me to explore how feminist poststructural theory, informed particularly by the work of Hélène Cixous, engages differently with psychoanalytic and discursive approaches to writing the self and about writing itself.

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