COMMUNICATION OF MULTIPLE IDENTITIES THROUGH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING

Identities are always in process, constructed across contexts and over time. Who we are is shaped both by various contexts and our perceptions of “self” within those contexts and by how we are perceived or positioned by others (McCarthey & Moje, 2002). “Autobiographical self” is the identity which people bring with them to any act of writing, shaped as it is by their prior social and discoursal history. In the current paper, the researcher analysed the autobiographical section of the introduction to a book in order to unveil the writer’s identities. The study was conducted within the social constructionist theory and a combination of literary, linguistic and interpretive approaches were used in analyzing the data. The writer of the autobiography communicated series of identities by varying her linguistic choices. As a result, multiple identities were discovered from the analysis of the data ranging from individual, academic to social roles. The findings of the study were the identities that the writer constructed in her writing. From the analysis, the writer of the autobiographical extract can be identified mainly as: a narrator, an academic, a researcher, a writer, a wife and a mother.