This book reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Experimenting with a mode of writing called "narrative criticism," the book interweaves the personal and the theoretical, anecdote and text. It is organized around a number of academic scenes in which the stakes of feminist critical performance are analyzed. The book focuses on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, and produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-dramas of institutional politics. Describing the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature, the book examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might not otherwise address each other, the book assesses a crisis, and offers a project for moving on. (NKA)