ABSTRACT
My first effort at presenting the argument of this essay went under a different subtitle: “The Cult of Autobiographical Criticism.” I was clearly thinking of myself as a courageous, nineteenth-century anthropologist going out into the world's dark corners with a rationalist or, worse still, Christian faith in the primitive status of alien forms of worship. This is the self-image I take to be implicit in the word “cult.” And I do still plan to take a tilt at todays “mock lyrists, large self-worshipers,/ And careless hectorers in proud bad verse.” 1 But the word I really have to use is not cult but culture: the culture of autobiographical criticism. For it has been nurtured and cherished awhile, and regularly fertilized; and it is, as a historical culture, inescapable, and not at all open to dismissal from some high point of disinterested inspection—as if it were a problem for them, or you, but not for me.
