Autobiography
An autobiography is a written account of a person's life, written by that person. It provides a first-person perspective on the author's experiences, thoughts, and emotions. Autobiographies are a popular literary genre that allows readers to gain insight into the life and perspective of the author.
7 Key excerpts on "Autobiography"
eBook - ePub- Julia Swindells Homerton College, Cambridge., Julia Swindells Homerton College, Cambridge.(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
...In these diverse projects, autobiographies are figured in new and challenging ways, as material through which these social forms are constituted. But Autobiography loses its singular and privileged status as a distinct genre and form of knowledge and we can no longer construct a history and a cultural field upon a select Weltliteratur plucked from the contexts of two millennia. I am critical of many of the attempts to claim Autobiography as a specifically literary form. These attempts often construct the historical approach to Autobiography as a straw positivism which fixates on referentiality and fails to understand the necessary role of fictionality and autobiographical representation. On the other hand, we need to pay more attention to the relationship between Autobiography and authorship: the way in which Autobiography serves to secure or guarantee authorship. Philippe Lejeune’s work on Autobiography has explored this aspect of the genre in detail. As so often, pathology is the key to anatomy: inauthentic or ghost-written autobiographies and the anxieties they arouse shed light on the construction of Autobiography itself. These texts indicate the existence of a convention, or what Lejeune calls a pact: ‘what the public consumes is the personal form of a discourse assumed by a real person, responsible for his writing as he is for his life’. 4 Autobiographies and biographies have played a key role in organizing the literary system and maintaining the value attached to the category of the literary and to authorship...
eBook - ePub- Barbara Caine(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...The growth of social history and the interest in ‘history from below’ which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s made these works particularly interesting and important to many historians. But this new interest in Autobiography and memoir has extended to literate and prominent people and even to political leaders. These personal writings are now read in a variety of different ways, and not simply as Kitson Clark had read the memoirs of eminent people earlier in the twentieth century, in order to assess the accuracy of their recollections of particular events. Most historians now look to autobiographies for what they reveal about the beliefs, ideas and subjectivity of their authors and for the insight they offer into how people saw and understood themselves and their worlds or how they constructed a persona or a public self. Rather than providing information about specific events, autobiographies are read for what they reveal about how religion, community, fate, gender, work, class, family life and the nature of the self were addressed and what the forms of address revealed about the mental and moral horizons of their authors. For many of those using or writing about autobiographies, the elements of fiction, the literary tropes, the moral comments, the calls on Providence that they contain are quite as important as any information that is offered about work, the family formation or the daily life of their authors. This is not to say that historians are no longer concerned about the accuracy or truth of an Autobiography, but rather that they are equally interested in understanding how or why an individual might have seen an event in a particular way, or in exploring what their recollections or reconstruction reveal about their mindset or world view. One of the first historians to use this approach was Natalie Zemon Davis, who discussed the autobiographical writings of three seventeenth-century women in her pioneering Women on the Margins...
eBook - ePubHistories of the Self
Personal Narratives and Historical Practice
- Penny Summerfield(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Autobiography, Memoir and The Historian Social, cultural and economic historians have been attracted to memoirs because they seem to overflow with information about people in the past. But at the same time as delighting in them, many have regarded them as presenting particular difficulties. Even the matter of terminology is less straightforward than it is with other genres of personal testimony. There is no agreed distinction between the terms memoir and Autobiography. ‘Memoir’ appears in the title of this chapter as an acknowledgement that ‘Autobiography’, literally self-life-writing, is often deployed as a more general term, to include a wide range of genres for recording the history of the self, including some, like oral history and self-portraiture, that do not involve writing. 1 In some cases, ‘Autobiography’ is used to refer to an account of a whole life, and ‘memoir’ for narratives of a specific segment of the past. In practice, however, nearly all historians use the two terms interchangeably, as we shall see in the work discussed below. 2 Scholarship on Autobiography and memoir alerts us to a number of issues about the genre. 3 Foundational work by Philippe Lejeune proposes the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’, an unwritten agreement between the writer and their public that the Autobiography is ‘true’. 4 Lejeune suggests that readers expect the contents of a memoir, in contrast to those of a novel or short story, to ‘tell the truth’. Thus, autobiographical texts are read as referential, in the sense that the central character, the ‘I’ of the text, is assumed to be one and the same as the author. They are also read as reflexive, in that the author is expected to record, and reflect upon, his or her ‘real’ life in the pages of the memoir. Numerous historians read memoirs in this way, using Autobiography as a source of factual evidence about the author, their experiences, and their social world...
eBook - ePubMen Writing Eating Disorders
Autobiographical Writing and Illness Experience in English and German Narratives
- Heike Bartel(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Emerald Publishing Limited(Publisher)
...The genre of Autobiography has a long literary tradition since the eighteenth century that, historically, has authoritatively demarcated the field of writing one’s own life. In the English-speaking context, the term ‘memoir’ has in recent years replaced the term ‘Autobiography’ in common usage despite generic differences. ‘Memoir’ still has very different connotations in the German context 1 and will therefore not be a major term of reference for literary scholarship in this study. Recent work in English and German Studies has contested and re-drawn the traditional boundaries of Autobiography. 2 Scholars in the field highlight that when it comes to writing the self, research needs to move beyond the concept of a fixed literary genre of Autobiography and work with ‘a moving target and an ever-changing practice without absolute rules’ (Smith & Watson, 2010, p. 8). It is within this ‘moving’ context of writing within, but also in defiance of, a particular literary tradition that we establish the narrative framework for our texts as a new contribution to a constantly evolving field of research. Undoubtedly, the notion of writing about one’s own life is at the centre of both terms, ‘Autobiography’ and ‘autobiographical writing’. However, this study prefers the adjective ‘autobiographical’ to describe processes and outcomes of writing; in this it follows most recent scholarship in the field (e.g. Wagner-Egelhaaf, 2019). This marks a shift away from the historical concept of the Autobiography as a long-established genre, and from a canon that historically only included particular types of ‘master narrative’ of ‘the sovereign self’ (Smith & Watson, 2010, p. 3). Anne Fleig emphasises: ‘It is not by accident that the so-called “golden age of European Autobiography” around 1800 coincides with the establishment of male concepts of authorship...
eBook - ePubTransculturing Auto/Biography
Forms of Life Writing
- Rosalia Baena, Rosalia Baena(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Ultimately, to analyze how authors engage differently with the autobiographical mode is to ask questions about the very nature and textures of narratives and the ways that these function in processes of self-formation and self-representation. Note 1. We use the term "life writing" as an overarching term which refers to a variety of nonfictional modes of writing that claim to engage the shaping of someone's life (Smith and Watson, 2001: 197). For a longer discussion of the term, see Kadar (1992). References Bergland, Betty. "Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the 'Other", In Autobiography and Postmodernism, edited by Kathleen Ashley et al. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, pp. 130—66. Brockmeier, Jens. "From End to the Beginning. Retrospective Teleology in Autobiography," In Narratire and Identity Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, edited by Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2001, pp 247-280. Deren, Maya. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, 1946. Rpt. in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, edited by Bill Nichols, Berkeley: University of California, 2001. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Gunn, Janet Varner. Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Kadar, Marlene, ed. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. "On Being Canadian Today." In Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Culture, edited by Hans Bak. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993, pp. 261-271. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie and Julia, Watson, eds. Interfaces, Women, Autobiography, Image...
eBook - ePub- Hywel Dix, Hywel Dix(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Sociologically speaking, one difference between autofiction in Doubrovsky’s sense and classical Autobiography is that the latter presupposes a large potential audience equipped with an a priori knowledge of and interest in the subject, from whose perceived high intellectual, cultural and/or political status those things are derived, whereas the writer of autofiction lacks such a perceived standing among the audience. This point could be pushed even further to suggest that a work of Autobiography is a narrative that reinforces a life story that the audience already understands to a greater or lesser degree, so that the audience’s prior experience of the subject is a formative element of Autobiography. By contrast, not only would autofiction then be a matter of introducing an unknown subject to the audience, but the important constitutive experience would be the author’s rather than the reader’s. Cusset even says, ‘I was not sure that I was writing anything that could be read by other people but it didn’t matter’ (6). In this sense, autofiction is a project of self-exploration and self-experimentation on the part of the author. This in turn is partly because many works of autofiction have been written in the aftermath of some kind of traumatic experience—real or imagined—so that the process of writing in response to trauma can be seen as a means of situating the self in a new context when other relational constructs have been removed or jeopardized. Arnaud Genon uses the term ‘faille fondatrice’—a founding fault—to refer to the traumatic experiences that have often driven writers to autofiction (58). 6 The sociological definition of autofiction is thus made partly on the basis of the perceived social status of the writer, and through extrapolation by invoking different kinds of experience on the part of the reader and writer. Yet the distinction between Autobiography and autofiction remains problematic for a number of reasons...
eBook - ePubA Guided Reader to Early Years and Primary English
Creativity, principles and practice
- Margaret Mallett(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...(2000) Biography and Autobiography. In V. Watson (ed.) The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meek, M. (1969) Information and Book Learning. Stroud: Thimble Press. Platt, R. (2014, 2nd edn) Castle Diary: The Journal of Tobias Burgess, Page. London: Walker Books. Comment It is argued here that the best autobiographies for children, as for adults, manage to be honest and, if possible, intriguing or at least interesting. Roald Dahl makes this point in a typically blunt manner in introducing his book – Boy: Tales of Childhood : ‘Autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This book is not an Autobiography.’ He means of course it is not a run-of-the-mill Autobiography. Boy does not just set out ‘the facts’, but rather is an opportunity to share adventures and experiences and to explain why particular views are held. One danger is that the writer of an Autobiography may be tempted to select what shows them in a good light and to justify behaviours they do not want to be subject to too much scrutiny. It is also possible for biographies to be too flattering. Every life has some puzzles and inconsistencies and discussion of these makes us speculate and wonder. Visual material often complements and extends the written text: photographs of people, buildings and landscapes, drawings and diagrams like family trees and timelines. Such material can enrich our understanding of someone’s circumstances and life experiences and open up more issues to explore. Finally, while print autobiographies and biographies continue to be important, it is suggested here that these can be supplemented by material on-screen. Before discussing the questions following this extract and Extract 54 it would be helpful to track down a selection of autobiographies and biographies for children and to bring them to the discussion group...
