Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald's writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII…

In recent years, memoir and the entire genre of creative nonfiction have received some negative publicity and some harsh criticism. Many have dismissed the "fourth genre," as it's called, as a form for the narcissistic and self-involved. Matters certainly are not helped when high-profile writers of memoir are revealed to be frauds and fiction…