Critics who have gathered around the body of autobiography, or of the autobiographer, seem to have done so prematurely. It is possible that a shift in critical sensibility has been occurring in recent years. This is partly to do with the areas of criticism that have taken up autobiography as a field of study. Feminist theory and black studies, for instance, have both been interested in autobiography, particularly in terms of subjectivity. This is not to suggest that these fields have rejected post-structuralist theories of autobiography—in fact, the reverse is usually true—but their interaction with them further addresses the issues brought up in such theory. Such critical positioning must imply, regardless of the theory, that autobiography refers in some way to the lives of the autobiographers under study.

An example of this shift can be seen in Paul John Eakin's Touching the World. Eakin does not reject post-structuralist arguments outright, but asks the question one must ask if one accepts them: ‘Why, we might well ask, with its pretension to reference exposed as illusion, does autobiography as a kind of reading and writing continue and even prosper? Why do we not simply collapse autobiography into the other literatures of fiction and have done with it?’ The answer has something to do, surprisingly, with Roland Barthes.