Abstract
Perhaps because I never wanted to be a historian but a novelist, or perhaps because I never had a single heritage to embrace, I became as a scholar more open to the deconstructive and decentering spirit of postmodernism. Or perhaps it was the events of my life and career which led me in that direction. Whatever the cause, these Confessions chronicle three-plus decades of a scholarly career which begins by chronicling the activities of the Left in traditional story form and ends up promoting the cause of memoir, fictional biography, and history on film as viable alternative modes of making the past important and meaningful to us in the present.