Malik 1 Zanali Malik Professor Guenzel ENC 1101-13 13 October 2013

Are All Pieces of Texts Really Autobiographical? In rhetorically analyzing a paper one has to establish a critical lens (a way to view a piece of literature and see if it agrees or disagrees to the parent topic) to see the paper and dissect it according to the lens the writer chose. What happens if the lens the writer is looking through to analyze an article contradicts the lens entirely? Is the piece still available to analyze? We answer these questions by looking at Donald M. Murrays article: All Writing is Autobiography and we will analyze it through the critical lens of another academic known as James E. Porter who wrote the article: Intertextuality and the Discourse Community. The two topics are, all writing is autobiographical and all writing is related to other writing subconsciously and consciously by using other texts. Does this mean all writing is not autobiographical and just borrowed? Or can the concepts complement each other?

Firstly, let us explain Murrays article. His main argument is why all writing is autobiographical no matter how much or how little information the authors decide to put into it. One can derive this concept of autobiographical understanding as whole truth, half truth, and personal interpretation. The whole truth is a pure autobiography, and the half truth has selective

Malik 2 details that are true about the writing and some that are not which can categorize the paper as autobiographical. Murray uses two powerful quotes from Willa Cather and Graham Greene. Cather declared Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. Graham Greene stated For writers it is always said that the first 20 years of life contain the whole of experience--the rest is observation. Tying it all up with personal interpretation, everyone can expand on an interpretation of something they read and tie it in with a personal experience. Is every constructed sentence by an author autobiographical? The answer is no because an autobiography is the story of someones life written by someone else.

In contrast with the topic of autobiography, Porters article on Intertextuality and the Discourse Community has two main concepts of how all writing ties in together and how that writing might be inhibited based on the discourse community (audience of peers). The idea of intertextuality is that all texts contain traces of other texts and there can be no text that does not draw on some ideas from some other texts. Porter even goes further to deepen the concept of intertextuality by showing a tremendous amount of research showing that Thomas Jefferson used ideas and pieces of other texts to create the Declaration of Independence. That sounds very similar to plagiarism but why did Thomas Jefferson not get accused of it? He can be credited with connecting all the texts together but it was a team effort, and it also states how Jefferson tied in personal pieces of literature from his adolescence to the actual Declaration itself. Porter then explains how the writers are autonomous but he argues that writers should engage in their

Malik 3 discourse community and shape what they have to say and readers will further mold their ideas with feedback.

What is Murray trying to get his readers to understand? How is all writing autobiographical if Porter specifically states that all writing relates to one another? In Porters article, the author states that the creative writer is the creative borrower, does that mean writers have even a touch or a sense in their own pieces of literature? According to Murray all writing is autobiographical even without all the details that would necessarily classify that piece of literature as an autobiography. Does this include Thomas Jefferson who made the Declaration of Independence autobiographical by including themes from his childhood? Yet he was found with thorough research that he used other texts in the writing of Americas most important piece of literature. Can the two topics actually be used together?

Murray goes into detail about how all the writing examples correlate to at least one part of an authors life but if we look at this through Porters concept of intertextuality does this mean his writing examples are all previous pieces of literature used to help him create his concept of autobiographical writing? Does this mean All Writing is Autobiographical is not his own concept but derived from other sources?

As one can see, analyzing this topic can additionally add greater questions that can further entice the rhetorical situation at hand. If even Jeffersons Declaration of Independence is

Malik 4 found to be pieced together by many literature excerpts, does that mean all of Murrays articles and sources can be traced to other important influential pieces of his childhood to young adult life according to Greenes research. How can a piece of literature be purely true without plagiarizing and using other texts. If someone wants to investigate this piece further with a more radical idea, does that mean our own autobiographies tie into some bigger pictures?