Analysis Of The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman

The first part of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman consequently demonstrates an imitative nearness to the original slave narratives, narratives of runaway slaves. Oddly, such features make the writing into a “writerly” rather than a “readerly” text, to use Roland Barthes’s categories. The text is supposedly a transcription of interviews and the reproduction of a voice, the product of a dialogue, in the line of the written tradition of slave narratives where the authenticating documents themselves enter a complex dialogue with the slave narrative that follows. Nevertheless, because The Autobiography exhibits a tension between the history and the memory in African American literature, Gates’s classification of the “speaker” might support