ABSTRACT
Within the qualitative approach to enquiry, narrative enquiry is a significant strand. Within narrative enquiry, auto/biography is a further significant strand. This simple taxonomy allows one to situate auto/biography as a genre of enquiry. This carries with it advantages of clarity and difficulties of oversimplification. These are parallel to those one encounters when attempting to define literary genres and place individual works within specific genres. As soon as one confines a text within a box or boundary, the text defies its placement there. It reveals complexities which question its unproblematic situatedness within the genre; one where it has been trapped. To give one concrete example: The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin (1974). Is this written, or to be read as fiction, as science fiction, as fantasy, as feminist, as metaphorical, utopian/ dystopian, novel, critique of Western cultural values, all or none of the above? We need categories and genres of enquiry in order to begin to think about the different qualities of diverse forms of text and research. Equally, we need to bear in mind always that these categories should be questioned and revised, revisited and represented. This is so that, as Hatch and Wisniewski say, we may ‘break through to the next level of understanding’ (Hatch and Wisniewski, 1995, p. 131).
