Autobiographical Writing

Abstract

So far this book has considered a range of representations of resilience in poetic, dramatic, biographical, and auto/biographical contexts. The exploration of the nature of resilience in those learners who survive and thrive in higher education, despite all sorts of obstacles that might reasonably be predicted to prevent them from doing so, has provided a number of readings of resilient adult learning. I am simultaneously inside and outside of the study; I am both a resilient learner myself as well as (apparently) an expert on resilience in adult learners. A commitment to the “principles” of Hélène Cixous’s understanding of l’écritureféminmehas meant that there has been a movement away from conventional academic writing toward a freer, more creative way of writing throughout the book. This has been accompanied by the deliberate stripping away of what Laurel Richardson calls the “authority moves” of academic writing.¹ A second ecdysis runs parallel to the theoretical shedding that was outlined in Chapter One. In this second shedding, the devices and protocols associated with academic language are shed to reveal fresh flesh. Each new skin is closer to a literary form of writing that is distinctive because of what Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson describe as its “margin of excess, latency, and plurality.”² The point of this second shedding is to take me as close as possible to a position of intellectual vulnerability in order to understand resilience from the “inside,” as it were.