Authors, narrators, and autonomous agents: The art of relational autobiography

Abstract

In this article, I consider several different ways of unpacking the metaphor of self‐authorship, asking what an author might be and how authorship thus understood might be related to personal autonomy. First, I consider authors as makers or creators in a generic sense. Next, I consider authors as a particular sort of creator (the creator of a text), and, finally, authors as an interpretive construct implied by a text. Ultimately, I argue that we both construct ourselves as authors and take responsibility for our self‐constructs through narrative self‐interpretation. Importantly, however, narrative self‐interpretation is not simply a process of individual self‐narration. Given the limitations placed on the autobiographical perspective by our temporal and subjective locations and the intersection of any one person's story with the stories of others, I argue that both autonomy and autobiography are best understood as relational.