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Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing (review)

had once been assumed—actually trumps the story that Neihardt had shaped. This chapter underscores the collaborative aspects of identity rhetoric. Selfshaping is strategized not only by individual speakers but also among interested translators and readers—as well as across historical and cultural shifts— as the purposes embedded within autobiographical narratives are negotiated and renegotiated. In Anderson’s concluding chapter, “Identity and the Rhetorical Self,” the author returns with emphasis and recalled examples to the doxical features of identity, and hence to identity’s power as rhetorical currency. Anderson’s book generally walks an admirable tightrope between theoretical sophistication and communicative clarity, and this final chapter’s prose particularly sparkles. That a concept such as identity might be considered banal, he summarizes, does not presuppose that the concept is inconsequential. Offering a construction metaphor as scaffolding for the argument he closes here, Anderson posits that “rhetors construct persuasive discourse out of what they find available, and what they labor to build with these available means must stand upon something” (162–63). When we are faced with what Anderson acknowledges are “compelling” theoretical challenges to identity, we might be dissuaded from investigating the important ways that self-writing operates. Sustaining the construction metaphor, he insists that “there may be times when we feel that identity is beneath us. But as the doxically attuned rhetorician reminds, so are foundations” (163). Identity, Anderson reiterates, need not be defended as an “essence,” as “something that one has” (165). When viewed through a rhetorical lens, identity narratives can be understood more productively—just as Burke understood constitutions—as a “rejoinder” to contemporaneous situations, as an effort to “encompass” and “address”—indeed, to “transform”—these situations. This book will be profoundly useful to readers of autobiography or other forms of life writing who aim to better assess and understand how audiences are construed and arguments are advanced within narratives that seem to offer personal disclosure alone.