autobiography narrative definition

Autobiography

Definition of autobiography.

Autobiography is one type of biography , which tells the life story of its author, meaning it is a written record of the author’s life. Rather than being written by somebody else, an autobiography comes through the person’s own pen, in his own words. Some autobiographies are written in the form of a fictional tale; as novels or stories that closely mirror events from the author’s real life. Such stories include Charles Dickens ’ David Copperfield  and J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye . In writing about personal experience, one discovers himself. Therefore, it is not merely a collection of anecdotes – it is a revelation to the readers about the author’s self-discovery.

Difference between Autobiography and Memoir

In an autobiography, the author attempts to capture important elements of his life. He not only deals with his career, and growth as a person, he also uses emotions and facts related to family life, relationships, education, travels, sexuality, and any types of inner struggles. A memoir is a record of memories and particular events that have taken place in the author’s life. In fact, it is the telling of a story or an event from his life; an account that does not tell the full record of a life.

Six Types of Autobiography

There are six types of autobiographies:

• Autobiography: A personal account that a person writes himself/herself.
• Memoir : An account of one’s memory.
• Reflective Essay : One’s thoughts about something.
• Confession: An account of one’s wrong or right doings.
• Monologue : An address of one’s thoughts to some audience or interlocuters.
• Biography : An account of the life of other persons written by someone else.

Importance of Autobiography

Autobiography is a significant genre in literature. Its significance or importance lies in authenticity, veracity, and personal testimonies. The reason is that people write about challenges they encounter in their life and the ways to tackle them. This shows the veracity and authenticity that is required of a piece of writing to make it eloquent, persuasive, and convincing.

Examples of Autobiography in Literature

Example #1:  the box: tales from the darkroom by gunter grass.

A noble laureate and novelist, Gunter Grass , has shown a new perspective of self-examination by mixing up his quilt of fictionalized approach in his autobiographical book, “The Box: Tales from the Darkroom.” Adopting the individual point of view of each of his children, Grass narrates what his children think about him as their father and a writer. Though it is really an experimental approach, due to Grass’ linguistic creativity and dexterity, it gains an enthralling momentum.

Example #2:  The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

In her autobiography, The Story of My Life , Helen Keller recounts her first twenty years, beginning with the events of the childhood illness that left her deaf and blind. In her childhood, a writer sent her a letter and prophesied, “Someday you will write a great story out of your own head that will be a comfort and help to many.”

In this book, Keller mentions prominent historical personalities, such as Alexander Graham Bell, whom she met at the age of six, and with whom she remained friends for several years. Keller paid a visit to John Greenleaf Whittier , a famous American poet, and shared correspondence with other eminent figures, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mrs. Grover Cleveland. Generally, Keller’s autobiography is about overcoming great obstacles through hard work and pain.

Example #3:  Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten

In his autobiography, “Self Portraits: Fictions ,” Frederic Tuten has combined the fringes of romantic life with reality. Like postmodern writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, the stories of Tuten skip between truth and imagination, time and place, without warning. He has done the same with his autobiography, where readers are eager to move through fanciful stories about train rides, circus bears, and secrets to a happy marriage; all of which give readers glimpses of the real man.

Example #4:  My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard

Reliving the success of his literary career through the lens of the many prizes he has received, Thomas Bernhard presents a sarcastic commentary in his autobiography, “My Prizes.” Bernhard, in fact, has taken a few things too seriously. Rather, he has viewed his life as a farcical theatrical drama unfolding around him. Although Bernhard is happy with the lifestyle and prestige of being an author, his blasé attitude and scathing wit make this recollection more charmingly dissident and hilarious.

Example #5:  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

“The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin ” is written by one of the founding fathers of the United States. This book reveals Franklin’s youth, his ideas, and his days of adversity and prosperity. He is one of the best examples of living the American dream – sharing the idea that one can gain financial independence, and reach a prosperous life through hard work.

Through autobiography, authors can speak directly to their readers, and to their descendants. The function of the autobiography is to leave a legacy for its readers. By writing an autobiography, the individual shares his triumphs and defeats, and lessons learned, allowing readers to relate and feel motivated by inspirational stories. Life stories bridge the gap between peoples of differing ages and backgrounds, forging connections between old and new generations.

Synonyms of Autobiography

The following words are close synonyms of autobiography such as life story, personal account, personal history, diary, journal, biography, or memoir.

Related posts:

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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2.2: Autobiographical Narrative

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An autobiographical narrative is one of the most personal types of essays. Not only are you writing a paper that expresses your own views and thoughts, but autobiographical narratives are based upon your own life experiences. Thus, it follows that the organization of the paper will also be more personal in nature. Unlike a narrative essay based on another individual, an autobiographical narrative will always contain your personal thoughts, desires, and motivations. While it is hard to know the motives of other individuals when writing a biographical narrative, unless you know the individual well, you always have access to the motivations for your own personal development. Hence, when you organize your autobiographical narrative you must format your essay around the events that promote your personal growth and the feeling you experienced before, during, and after these events.

There are several ways to incorporate your thoughts, feelings, and motivations into the organization of your paper. First, you can consider integrating your description of certain events with your motives and thoughts for the events. This way, you present the events and your motivations both in chronological order and simultaneously. This means that you are describing the events and your feelings as they occurred, or at the same time. Second, you can consider blocking your description of your events and your feelings, providing a paragraph describing the event followed by a paragraph describing your motivations. Also, you could also reverse this blocking format to first provide your motivations and then the description of the event.

How do these two examples compare? Although they both narrate the same event, is one more effective than the other? Generally, the first organizational scheme (when you integrate description and motivations together) is the most seamless. By incorporating the two together, you provide the reader with a more complete picture of the event – as if the reader is experiencing the event as it unfolds in your narration. However, sometimes this formatting does not work, specifically with complicated events. If you feel that the event you are narrating is too difficult to explain or clarify, then you should consider breaking your description and thoughts into two separate paragraphs. Although, you need to be aware of how this affects the story you are telling. Do you want the importance of the event to be at the end? In doing so, you make the event seem more suspenseful, and you can make the reader more compelled to finish your narrative. Nevertheless, organizing your paper in this way places more of a burden on you as a writer because you must clearly connect the separate ideas in the paragraphs.

Regardless of the organizational scheme you choose, you must properly describe your personal growth. In order to do so, you must organize your essay around one significant event or a collection of interrelated specific events. Generally, the number of events you include defines the amount of detail you put into describing your events. If your paper centers around one main event that helped shape your personal growth, the majority of the body would describe the one event while the introduction and conclusion would include your thoughts and feelings from before and after the event to help clarify how the occurrence helped shape you. However, if your paper details a succession of events that culminate in your personal growth, the description of each event, including the insights and feelings associated with it, would be limited to a single body paragraph. In this case, the introduction and conclusion would still indicate how you felt and thought both before and after the transformation.

autobiography

What is autobiography definition, usage, and literary examples, autobiography definition.

An  autobiography  (awe-tow-bye-AWE-gruh-fee) is a self-written  biography . The author writes about all or a portion of their own life to share their experience, frame it in a larger cultural or historical context, and/or inform and entertain the reader.

Autobiographies have been a popular literary genre for centuries. The first Western autobiography is attributed to Saint Augustine of Hippo for his 13-book work titled  Confessions , written between 397 and 400 CE. Some autobiographies are a straightforward narrative that recollects a linear chain of events as they unfolded. The genre has expanded and evolved to include different approaches to the form.

The word  autobiography  comes from the Ancient Greek  auto  (“self”) +  bios  (“life”) +  graphein  (“to write”) = “a self-written life.” It is also known as autography .

The History of Autobiography

Scholars regard Augustine’s  Confessions  as the first Western autobiography. Other autobiographical works from antiquity include Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’s  Vita  (circa 99 CE) and Greek scholar Libanius’s  Oration I  (374 CE). Works of this kind were called apologias, which essentially means “in my defense.” Writers approached these works not as acts of self-documentation but as self-defense. They represented a way to explain and provide rationale for their life, work, and escapades. There was also less focus on their emotional lives.

The Book of Margery Kempe , written in 1438 by an English Christian mystic, is the earliest known autobiography in English. (Though it didn’t see full publication until the 20th century.) Other early English-language biographies of note include:

• Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s 1764 memoirs
• John Bunyan’s  Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners  in 1666
• Jarena Lee’s  The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee  (the first autobiography of an African American woman)

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s  Confessions was published in 1782. It paved the way for the more thoughtful, emotionally centered autobiographies seen today. Autobiography as a literary genre emerged a few years later, when British scholar William Taylor first used the term to describe a self-written biography. He did so disparagingly, suggesting the form was  pedantic . In 1809, English Romantic poet Robert Southey used the term more seriously to describe self-written biographies.

Starting in the 20th century, more young people started writing autobiographies. Perhaps the most famous example is Anne Frank’s  The Diary of a Young Girl , about her time hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. The 21st century saw an increase in autobiographical essay collections and memoirs by younger celebrities, including:

• Anna Kendrick
• Mindy Kaling
• Gabourey Sidibe
• Mike Birbiglia
• Lena Dunham
• Chelsea Handler

Autobiographies are not immune to controversy. One notable scandal involved author James Frey’s  A Million Little Pieces . Originally billed as a memoir, evidence later emerged that Frey invented key parts of the story. This example underscores how easily authors can cross over into autofiction—fictional autobiography—and how seriously readers take authors’ responsibility to accurately and honestly market their books.

Types of Autobiographies

There are a few different types of self-written works that qualify as autobiography.

Standard Autobiographies

In the most traditional form, authors recount their life or specific formative events from their life. This approach often utilizes a chronological format of events, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. An author’s approach might include a framing device such as flashbacks, in which they move from the present to the past as they remember their lives. For example, Broadway star Patti LuPone’s self-titled autobiography begins on the opening night of  Gypsy  in 2004 before moving back in time to LuPone’s childhood. An author could take a more stream-of-consciousness style, in which one memory links to another by a common theme. Irish writer Seán O’Casey narrates his six-volume  Autobiographies  in this manner

This is a type of autobiography that is narrower in scope and focus. It places greater emphasis on particular memories, thoughts, and feelings. A standard autobiography can certainly cover some of this same ground—most do—but the memoir is more interested in individual events or defined portions of the author’s life and the emotions and lessons behind them.

Henry David Thoreau is a notable memoirist. In Walden , he reflects on his time spent living in solitude in the woods of Massachusetts and what he learned about life and nature throughout this experience. Another example is  The Year of Magical Thinking  by Joan Didion, which relates the death of her husband and its impact on her life and work. Another is  Wild  by Cheryl Strayed, wherein Strayed remembers her time hiking the Pacific Crest Trail during a period of great change in her life.

Autofiction

The fictionalized autobiography, or autofiction, is another type of autobiography. The author presents their story not as fact but as fiction. This method gives them considerable space to take creative license with events and characters, thereby blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The overall goal is less about the author wanting to obscure facts and make things up and more a matter of taking another tactic to delve into their experiences in service of self-discovery.  Taipei  by Tao Lin is a work of autofiction. The central character, Paul, mirrors Lin’s own life and experiences, from the literary world of New York City to his ancestral roots in Taiwan.

Spiritual Autobiographies

These autobiographies center on the author’s religious or spiritual awakening and the subsequent journey their faith has taken them on. Common elements include struggles and doubt, a life-altering conversion, periods of regression, and sharing the “message.” These all act as endorsements of the author’s faith. Augustine’s  Confessions , Paramahansa Yogananda’s  Autobiography of a Yogi , and Augusten Burroughs’s  Toil & Trouble: A Memoir  are all spiritual autobiographies.

Autobiography vs. Biography

Both autobiographies and  biographies  are records of real lives, but there is one major distinction. A person other than the book’s subject writes a biography, while the subject themselves writes an autobiography. In this way, an autobiography is essentially a biography of the self. The biographer’s job is typically more involved, entailing detailed research into the life of the subject. The autobiographer, however, is usually not burdened by this because they lived through the events they write about. They may need only to confirm dates and stories to accurately relate the pertinent details.

The Function of Autobiography

An autobiography allows the author to tell the true story of their own life. This is the reason why autobiographies have always been written by famous people. History tends to remember notable individuals for just one significant contribution or event and, even then, the public’s perception of it may be inaccurate. Writing an autobiography allows the author to share the real story and put it into the larger context of their life and times.

Most readers pick up an autobiography expecting some degree of subjectivity from the author. After all, the events chronicled happened to the author, so the writing will of course have a biased  perspective . There are advantages to this subjectivity, though. The reader gets the real story directly from the person who lived it, unvarnished by others’ opinions or erroneous historical data.

One way this subjectivity is problematic is that the author may not possess the ability to see the story they’re telling from other perspectives. For example, they may not acknowledge any hurt they caused others, dangerous behaviors they engaged in, or the “other side” of a controversial event in which there are equally valid opposing viewpoints and experiences. Any of these deficiencies can result in a somewhat skewed narrative.

Writers Known for Autobiography & Autobiography Books

• Maya Angelou,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ,  Gather Together in My Name
• Jung Chang,  Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
• Isak Dinesen,  Out of Africa ,  Shadows on the Grass
• Carrie Fisher,  Wishful Drinking ,  Shockaholic
• Anne Frank,  The Diary of a Young Girl
• Ernest Hemingway,  A Moveable Feast
• Karl Ove Knausgård,  My Struggle
• Frank McCourt,  Angela’s Ashes
• Anaïs Nin,  The Diaries of Anaïs Nin
• Marcel Proust,  Remembrance of Things Past
• Patti Smith,  Just Kids ,  M Train
• Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain
• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
• Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
• Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography 

Examples of Autobiographies

1. Maya Angelou,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Angelou’s autobiography is the first installment in a seven-volume series chronicling the life of the legendary poet, teacher, actress, director, dancer, and civil rights activist. Given all those roles, it’s easy to see why Angelou’s life story makes for interesting reading.

This volume centers primarily on her early life in Stamps, Arkansas, and the devastating effects of a childhood rape. It also explores racism in the American South. It discuses the important role reading plays in helping young Maya deal with the sexual assault and pervasive prejudice in her environment.

2. Helen Keller,  The Story of My Life

Keller’s autobiography details her first 20 years, starting with the childhood illness that caused her blindness and deafness. She discusses the obstacles she had to overcome and the life-changing relationship she shared with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who helped her learn to read and write. Keller also documents her friendships with several famous figures of her day, including Alexander Graham Bell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and First Lady Frances Cleveland.

3. Vinh Chung,  Where the Wind Leads

Chung’s autobiography recalls the harrowing story of a Vietnamese refugee and his journey to make the American Dream his own. Born in South Vietnam, Chung comes of age in a changing political climate that eventually compels his family to flee the country. Their voyage takes them through the South China Sea, run-ins with pirates, resettlement in Arkansas, and Chung’s graduation from Harvard Medical School.

How to Write an Autobiography

Autobiography is a truly universal art form and is accessible to anyone, whether you're in high school or 100 years old. Exploring the process of writing an autobiography deserves an article in itself, but the process should include these steps:

• Determine your "why." What lessons do you want to impart via your story, and why are they worth sharing with a broader audience?
• Draft an autobiographical outline. It should include information about your upbringing, impactful moments throughout your life, stories of failure and success, and meaningful mentors.
• Begin with the easiest sections. Getting started is often the greatest hurdle, so begin by writing the chapters that feel most accessible or enjoyable.
• Write your first draft. Once you write the first chapters, it will feel easier to write the rest. Capitalize on your momentum and write a full draft.
• Step away. As with anything, stepping away from your work will help foster fresh perspectives when you return.
• Edit and re-write your draft. Your first draft will probably benefit from thorough revisions, as will your second draft, and maybe your third. Continue to edit and revise until it feels right.
• Ask for help. Bring in a trusted family member or friend or professional editor to help with final edits.

Further Resources on Autobiography

ThoughtCo. shares some  important points to consider before writing an autobiography .

The Living Handbook of Narratology delves into the  history of the autobiography .

MasterClass breaks autobiography writing down into  eight basic steps .

Pen & the Pad looks at the  advantages and disadvantages of the autobiography .

Lifehack has a list of  15 autobiographies everyone should read at least once .

Related Terms

• Frame Story
• Point of View

How to Define Autobiography

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

An autobiography is an account of a person's life written or otherwise recorded by that person. Adjective: autobiographical .

Many scholars regard the Confessions (c. 398) by Augustine of Hippo (354–430) as the first autobiography.

The term fictional autobiography (or pseudoautobiography ) refers to novels that employ first-person narrators who recount the events of their lives as if they actually happened. Well-known examples include David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens and Salinger's  The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Some critics believe that all autobiographies are in some ways fictional. Patricia Meyer Spacks has observed that "people do make themselves up. . . . To read an autobiography is to encounter a self as an imaginative being" ( The Female Imagination , 1975).

For the distinction between a memoir and an autobiographical composition, see memoir  as well as the examples and observations below. 

From the Greek, "self" + "life" + "write"

Examples of Autobiographical Prose

• Imitating the Style of the Spectator , by Benjamin Franklin
• Langston Hughes on Harlem
• On the Street, by Emma Goldman
• Ritual in Maya Angelou's Caged Bird
• The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery, by Margaret Sanger
• Two Ways of Seeing a River, by Mark Twain

Examples and Observations of Autobiographical Compositions

• "An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing." (Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant , 1968)
• "Putting a life into words rescues it from confusion even when the words declare the omnipresence of confusion, since the art of declaring implies dominance." (Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England . Harvard University Press, 1976)
• The Opening Lines of Zora Neale Hurston's Autobiography - "Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say. "So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life. "I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town--charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all. It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America. "Eatonville is what you might call hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. The town was not in the original plan. It is a by-product of something else. . . ." (Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road . J.B. Lippincott, 1942) - "There is a saying in the Black community that advises: 'If a person asks you where you're going, you tell him where you've been. That way you neither lie nor reveal your secrets.' Hurston had called herself the 'Queen of the Niggerati.' She also said, 'I like myself when I'm laughing.' Dust Tracks on a Road is written with royal humor and an imperious creativity. But then all creativity is imperious, and Zora Neale Hurston was certainly creative." (Maya Angelou, Foreword to Dust Tracks on a Road , rpt. HarperCollins, 1996)
• Autobiography and Truth "All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies; I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict him." (George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches , 1898)" " Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people." (attributed to Thomas Carlyle, Philip Guedalla, and others)
• Autobiography and Memoir - "An autobiography is the story of a life : the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life. A writer's autobiography, for example, is not expected to deal merely with the author's growth and career as a writer but also with the facts and emotions connected to family life, education, relationships, sexuality, travels, and inner struggles of all kinds. An autobiography is sometimes limited by dates (as in Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing), but not obviously by theme. "Memoir, on the other hand, is a story from a life . It makes no pretense of replicating a whole life." (Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art . Eighth Mountain Press, 2002) - "Unlike autobiography , which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer's life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance." (William Zinsser, "Introduction," Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir . Mariner Books, 1998)
• An "Epidemical Rage for Auto-Biography" "[I]f the populace of writers become thus querulous after fame (to which they have no pretensions) we shall expect to see an epidemical rage for auto-biography break out, more wide in its influence and more pernicious in its tendency than the strange madness of the Abderites, so accurately described by Lucian. London, like Abdera, will be peopled solely by 'men of genius'; and as the frosty season, the grand specific for such evils, is over, we tremble for the consequences. Symptoms of this dreadful malady (though somewhat less violent) have appeared amongst us before . . .." (Isaac D'Israeli, "Review of "The Memoirs of Percival Stockdale," 1809)|
• The Lighter Side of Autobiography - "The Confessions of St. Augustine are the first autobiography , and they have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they are addressed directly to God." (Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries , 1916) - "I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography , I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or isn't." (Philip Roth, Deception , 1990) - "I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography ." (Steven Wright)

Pronunciation: o-toe-bi-OG-ra-fee

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Autobiography

Notoriously difficult to define, autobiography in the broader sense of the word is used almost synonymously with “life writing” and denotes all modes and genres of telling one’s own life. More specifically, autobiography as a literary genre signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it, seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development within a given historical, social and cultural framework. While autobiography on the one hand claims to be non-fictional (factual) in that it proposes to tell the story of a ‘real’ person, it is inevitably constructive, or imaginative, in nature and as a form of textual ‘self-fashioning’ ultimately resists a clear distinction from its fictional relatives (autofiction, autobiographical novel), leaving the generic borderlines blurred.

Explication

Emerging from the European Enlightenment, with precursors in antiquity, autobiography in its ‘classic’ shape is characterized by autodiegetic, i.e. 1st-person subsequent narration told from the point of view of the present. Comprehensive and continuous retrospection, based on memory, makes up its governing structural and semantic principle. Oscillating between the struggle for truthfulness and creativity, between oblivion, concealment, hypocrisy, self-deception and self-conscious fictionalizing, autobiography renders a story of personality formation, a Bildungsgeschichte . As such, it was epitomized by Rousseau ( [1782–89] 1957 ); Goethe ( [1808–31] 1932 ) and continued throughout the 19th century and beyond (Chateaubriand [1848/50] 2002 ; Mill [1873]1989 , with examples of autobiographical fiction in Moritz ( [1785–86] 2006 ), Dickens ( [1850] 2008 ), Keller ( [1854–55] 1981 ; a second, autodiegetic version [1879–80] 1985 ) and Proust ( [1913–27] 1988 ). While frequently disclaiming to follow generic norms, its hallmark is a focus on psychological introspection and a sense of historicity, frequently implying, in the instance of a writer’s autobiography, a close link between the author’s life and literary work.

Although 1st-person narrative continues to be the dominant form in autobiography, there are examples of autobiographical writing told in the 3rd person (e.g. Stein 1933 ; Wolf 1976 ), in epistolary form (e.g. Plato’s Seventh Letter ca. 353 B.C. [1966] ) and in verse (Wordsworth [1799, 1805, 1850] 1979 ). However, with its ‘grand narrative’ of identity, the classic 1st-person form of autobiography has continued to provide the generic model around which new autobiographical forms of writing and new conceptions of autobiographical selves have taken shape. At the heart of its narrative logic lies the duality of the autobiographical person, divided into ‘narrating I’ and ‘narrated I’, marking the distance between the experiencing and the narrating subject. Whereas the ‘narrated I’ features as the protagonist, the ‘narrating I’, i.e. the 1st-person narrator, ultimately personifies the agent of focalization, the overall position from which the story is rendered, although the autobiographical narrator may temporarily step back to adopt an earlier perspective. A pseudo-static present point of narration as the ultimate end of autobiographical writing is thus implied, rendering the trajectory of autobiographical narrative circular, as it were: the present is both the end and the condition of its narration. However, this apparent circularity is frequently destabilized by the dynamics of the narrative present, as the autobiographer continues to live while composing his/her narrative, thus leaving the perspective open to change unless the position of ‘quasi death’ is adopted, as in Hume’s notoriously stoic presentation of himself as a person of the past (Hume 1778 ). At the other end of the spectrum of self-positionings as autobiographical narrator, Wordsworth testifies to the impossibility of autobiographical closure in his verse autobiography ( [1799, 1805, 1850] 1979 ). Again and again, he rewrites the same time span of his life. As his life continues to progress, his subject—the “growth of a poet’s mind” ( [1850, subtitle] 1979 )—perpetually appears to him in a new light, requiring continual revision even though the ‘duration’ (the time span covered) in fact remains the same, thus reflecting the instability of the autobiographical subject as narrator. Accordingly, the later narrative versions bear the mark of the different stages of writing. The narrative present, then, can only ever be a temporary point of view, affording an “interim balance” (de Bruyn [1992] 1994 ) at best, leaving the final vantage point an autobiographical illusion.

With its dual structural core, the autobiographical 1st-person pronoun may be said to reflect the precarious intersections and balances of the “idem” and “ipse” dimensions of personal identity pertaining to spatio-temporal sameness and selfhood as agency (Ricœur 1991 ). In alternative theoretical terms, it may be related to “three identity dilemmas”: “sameness […] across time,” being “unique” in the face of others; and “agency” (Bamberg 2011 : 6–8; Bamberg → Identity and Narration ). In a more radical, deconstructive twist of theorizing autobiographical narrative in relation to the issue ofidentity, the 1st-person dualism inherent in autobiography appears as a ‘writing the self’ by another, as a mode of “ghostwriting” (Volkening 2006 : 7).

Beyond this pivotal feature of 1st-person duality, further facets of the 1st-person pronoun of autobiography come into play. Behind the narrator, the empirical writing subject, the “Real” or “Historical I” is located, not always in tune with the ‘narrating’ and ‘experiencing I’s’, but considered the ‘real author’ and the external subject of reference. The concept of the “ideological I” suggested by Smith and Watson (eds. 2001 ) is a more precarious one. It is conceived as an abstract category which, unlike its narrative siblings, is not manifest on the textual level, but in ‘covert operation’ only. According to Smith and Watson, it signifies “the concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells the story” (eds. 2001 : 59–61) and thus reflects the social (and intertextual) embedding of any autobiographical narrative. Reconsidered from the viewpoint of social sciences and cognitive narratology alike, the ‘ideological I’ derives from culturally available generic and insti­tutional genres, structures and institutions of self-representation. Depending on the diverse (inter-)disciplinary approaches to the social nature of the autobiographical self, these are variously termed “master narrative,” “patterns of emplotment,” “schema,” “frame,” cognitive “script” (e.g. Neumann et al. eds. 2008 ), or even “biography generator” ( Biographie­generatoren , Hahn 1987 : 12). What ties this heterogeneous terminology together is the basic assumption that only through an engagement with such socially/culturally prefigured models, their reinscription, can individuals represent themselves as subjects.

The social dimension of autobiography also comes into play on an intratextual level in so far as any act of autobiographical communication addresses another—explicitly so in terms of constructing a narratee, who may be part of the self, a “Nobody,” an individual person, the public, or God as supreme Judge.

At the same time, autobiography stages the self in relation to others on the level of narrative. Apart from personal models or important figures in one’s life story, autobiographies may be centred on a relationship of self and other to an extent that effectively erases the boundaries between auto- and heterobiography (e.g. Gosse [1907] 2004 ; Steedman 1987 ). In such cases, the (auto)biographical “routing of a self known through its relational others” is openly displayed, undermining the model “of life narrative as a bounded story of the unique, individuated narrating subject” (Smith & Watson eds. 2001 : 67). With its several dimensions of social ‘relatedness’, then, autobiographical writing is never an autonomous act of self-reflection, as sociological theorists of (auto-)biography have long argued (e.g. Kohli 1981 : 505–16). From a sociological angle, it may be considered a form of social action making sense of personal experience in terms of general relevance (Sloterdijk 1978 : 21). Autobiographical patterns of relevance are culturally specific, diverse and subject to historical change, as the history of autobiography with its multitude of forms and writing practices demonstrates.

Autobiography in Historical Perspective

Whereas its origins ultimately date back to antiquity (Roesler 2005 ), with Augustine’s Confessions ( [398–98] 1961 ) as a prominent ancient landmark, the history of autobiography as a (factual) literary genre and critical term is a much shorter one. In German, the term Selbstbiographie first featured in the collective volume Selbstbiographien berühmter Männer ( 1796 ) [Self-Biographies by Famous Men], its editor Seybold claiming Herder as source. Jean Paul called his unfinished and unpublished autobiography Selberlebens­beschrei­bung [‘description of one’s life by oneself’] ( [1818­–19] 1987 : 16). In English, D’Israeli spoke of “self-biography” in 1796 (95–110), while his critic Taylor suggested “auto-biography” (Nussbaum 1989 : 1). These neologisms reflect a concern with a mode of writing only just considered to be a distinct species of (factual) literature at the time; not until the mid-18th century did autobiography separate from historiography as well as from a general notion of biography. The latter, variously coined ‘life’, ‘memoir’ or ‘history’, had not distinguished between what Johnson then seminally parted as “telling his own story” as opposed to “recounting the life of another” ( [1750] 1969 and [1759] 1963 ).

The emergence of autobiography as a literary genre and critical term thus coincides with what has frequently been called the emergence of the modern subject around 1800. It evolved as a genre of non-fictional, yet ‘constructed’ autodiegetic narration wherein a self-reflective subject enquires into his/her identity and its developmental trajectory. The autobiographer looks back to tell the story of his/her life from the beginning to the present, tracing the story of its own making—in Nietzsche’s words, “How One Bec[ame] What One Is” ( [1908] 1992 ). As it tends to focus on the autobiographical subject as singular individual, auto­biography in the modern sense is thus marked by the secularization and the “temporalization ( Historisierung) of experience” (Burke 2011 : 13). In contrast, pre-modern spiritual autobiography, which followed the tradition of Augustine’s Confessions and continued well into the 19th century, constructed its subject as exemplum, i.e. as a typical story to be learnt from. Little emphasis was put on life-world particularities (although these tended to acquire their own popular dynamics as in crime confessions ). Dividing life into clear-cut phases centred round the moment of conversion, the spiritual autobiographer tells the story of self-renunciation and surrenders to providence and grace (e.g. Bunyan [1666] 1962 ). Its narrative becomes possible only after the key experience of conversion, yielding up a ‘new self’. Accordingly, Augustine commented on his former self with great detachment: “But this was the man I was” ( [387–98] 1961 : 105). While on the level of story, then, the division in spiritual autobiographies is one of ‘before’ and ‘after’, the level of narrative being ruled by the perspective of ‘after’ almost exclusively: only after and governed by the experience of conversion to Christian belief can the story be told at all. The moment of anagnōrisis and narrative present do not coincide.

The narrative mode of modern autobiography as a literary genre, firmly linked to the notion of the individual, evolved to some extent by propelling the moment of self-recognition towards the narrative present: only at the end of one’s story can it be unfurled from the beginning as a singular life course, staging the autobiographer as subject. The secular self accounts for itself as autonomous agent, (ideally) in charge of itself. This is the narrative logic of autobiography in its ‘classic shape’ that also informed the autobiographical novel. By 1800, the task of autobiography was to represent a unique individual, as claimed by Rousseau for himself: “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not like any of those who are in existence” ( [1782] 1957 : 1). Most prominently, Goethe explicitly writes of himself as a singular individual embedded in and interacting with the specific constellations of his time ( [1808–31] 1932 ). Autobiography thus focuses on the life of a singular individual within its specific historical context, retracing the “genetic personality de­ve­lop­ment founded in the awareness of a complex in­terplay bet­ween I-and-my-world” (Weintraub 1982 : 13). In this sense, it may be seen to represent the “full convergence of all the factors constituting this modern view of the self” (XV). Its central figure is that of a Romantic self-constitution, grounded in memory.

As memory informs autobiography, self-consciously reflected upon since Augustine (Book XX, Confessions ), the boundaries between fact and fiction are inevitably straddled, as Goethe’s title Dichtung und Wahrheit ( Poetry and Truth ) ( [1808–31] 1932 ) aptly suggests. In the face of the inevitable subjectivity (or fallibility) of autobiographical recollection, the creative dimension of memory, and thus autobiography’s quality as verbal/aesthetic fabrication, has come to the fore. In this respect, the history of autobiography as a literary genre is closely interrelated with corresponding forms of autofiction/the autobiographical novel, with no clear dividing lines, even though autobiographical fiction tends to leave “signposts” of its fictionality to be picked up by the reader (Cohn 1999 ). In any case, autobiography’s temporal linearity and narrative coherence has frequently proved prone to deliberate anachronisms and disruptions—programmatically so in Nabokov ( 1966 ). Indeed, by the early 20th century there was an increasing scepticism about the possibility of a cohesive self emerging through autobiographical memory. Modernist writers experimented with fragmentation, subverting chronology and splitting the subject (Woolf 1985 , published posthumously; Stein 1933 ), foregrounding visual and scenic/topographical components, highlighting the role of language (Sartre [1964] 2002 ), conflating auto- and heterobiography or transforming lives into fiction (e.g. Proust [1913–27] 1988 ).

Critical Paradigms in Historical Perspective

From its critical beginnings, then, autobiography has been inextricably linked to the critical history of subjectivity. In his monumental study of 1907, Misch explicitly surveyed the history of autobiography as a reflection of the trajectory of forms of subjective consciousness ( [1907] 1950 : 4). He thus acknowledged the historical specificity of forms of autobiographical self-reflection. With his concept of autobiography as “a special genre in literature” and at the same time “an original interpretation of experience” (3–4), Misch aligned with the hermeneutics of Dilthey, who considered autobiography the supreme form of the “understanding of life.” Such understanding involves selection as the autobiographical self takes from the infinite moments of experience those elements that, in retrospect, appear relevant with respect to the entire life course. The past is endowed with meaning in the light of the present. Understanding, according to Dilthey, also involves fitting the individual parts into a whole, ascribing interconnection and causality ( [1910] 2002 : 221–22). Autobiography thus constructs an individual life course as a coherent, meaningful whole. Even if autobiography’s aspect of re-living experience, of rendering incidents as they were experienced at the time, is taken into account, the superior ‘interpreting’ position of the narrative present remains paramount, turning past events into a meaningful plot, making sense ( Sinn ) of contingency.

Hermeneutics continued to dominate the theory of autobiography, lagging behind its poetic practices. Gusdorf defined autobiography as “a kind of apologetics or theodicy of the indivi­dual being” ( 1980 : 39), yet shifted the emphasis somewhat by prioritizing its literary over its historical function. Anglo-American theories of autobiography similarly tended to focus on such a poetical norm of autobiography as a literary work devoted to “inner truth” (Pascal 1960 ), with Rousseau’s/Goethe’s autobiography as the recognizable generic model. “Any auto­biography that resembles modern auto­biographies in structure and content is the modern kind of au­to­biography”; these are “works like those that modern readers in­stinctively expect to find when they see Autobiography , My Life , or Memoirs printed across the back of a volume” (Shumaker 1954 : 5). Whether hermeneutics- or New Criticism-inspired, the history of autobiography as“art” (Niggl 1988 : 6) is seen to culminate around 1800, while its more immediate forerunners are often located in the Renaissance or earlier (e.g. Petrarch [1326] 2005 ; Cellini [1558–66] 1995 ). With regard to the primary role of the autobiographer as subject of his work, Starobinski argued that his/her singularity was articulated by way of idiosyncratic style ( 1970 , [1970] 1983 ).

Only in the wake of the various social, cultural and linguistic turns of literary and cultural theory since the 1970s did autobiography lose this normative frame. Relying on Freud and Riesman, Neumann established a social psychology - based typology of autobiographical forms. Aligning different modes of narrative with different conceptions of identity, he distinguished between the external orientation of res gestae and memoir, representing the individual as social type, on the one hand, as opposed to autobiography with its focus on memory and identity ( 1970 : esp. 25), on the other hand. Only autobiography aims at personal identity whereas the memoir is concerned with affirming the autobiographer’s place in the world.

More recent research has elaborated on the issue of autobiographical narrative and identity in psychological terms (Bruner 1993 ) as well as from interdisciplinary angles, probing the inevitability of narrative as constitutive of personal identity (e.g. Eakin 2008 ) in the wake of “the twin crisis of identity and narrative in the twentieth century” (Klepper 2013 : 2) and exploring forms of non-linearity, intermediality or life writing in the new media (Dünne & Moser 2008 ). The field of life writing as narratives of self—or of various forms of self—has thus become significantly broader, transcending the classic model of autobiographical identity qua coherent retrospective narrative. Yet whatever its theoretical remodelling and practical rewritings, even if frequently subverted in practice, the close nexus between narrative, self/identity, and the genre/practice of autobiography continues to be considered paramount. The underlying assumption concerning autobiography is that of a close, even inextricable connection between narrative and identity, with autobiography the prime generic site of enactment. Moreover, life narrative has even been promoted in modernity to a “general cultural pattern of knowledge” (Braun & Stiegler eds. 2012 : 13). (While these approaches tend to address autobiographical writing practices claiming to be or considered non-fictional, their relevance extends to autofictional forms.)

Next to narrative and identity, the role of memory in (autobiographical) self-constructions has been addressed (Olney 1998 ), in particular adopting cognitivist (e.g. Erll et al., eds. 2003 ) and psychoanalytical (Pietzcker 2005 ) angles as well as elaborating the neurobiological foundations of autobiographical memory (Markowitsch & Welzer 2005 ). From the perspective of ‘natural’ narratology, the experiential aspect of autobiography, its dimension of re-living and reconstructing experience, has been emphasized (Löschnigg 2010 : 259).

With memory being both a constitutive faculty and a creative liability, the nature of the autobiogra­phical subject has also been revised in terms of psychoanalytical, (socio‑) psychological or even deconstructive cate­gories (e.g. Holdenried 1991 ; Volkening 2006 ). ‘Classic autobiography’ has turned out to be a limited historical phenomenon whose foundations and principles have been increasingly challenged and subverted with respect to poetic practice, poetological reflection and genre theory alike. Even within a less radical theoretical frame, chronological linearity, retrospective narrative closure and coherence as mandatory generic markers have been dis­qualified, or at least re-conceptualized as structural tools (e.g. Kronsbein 1984 ). Autobiography’s generic scope now includes such forms as the diary/journal as “serial autobiography” (Fothergill 1974 : 152), the “Literary Self-Portrait” as a more heterogeneous and complex literary type (Beaujour [1980] 1991 ) and the essay (e.g. Hof & Rohr eds. 2008 ). While autobiography has thus gained in formal and thematic diversity, autobiographical identity appears a transitory phenomenon at best. In its most radical deconstructive twist, autobiography is reconceptionalized as a rhetorical figure—“prosopopeia”—that ultimately produces “the illu­sion of reference” (de Man 1984 : 81). De Man thus challenges the very foundations of autobiography in that it is said to create its subject by means of rhetorical language rather than represent the subject. Autobiography operates in complicity with metaphysical notions of self-consciousness, intentionality and language as a means of representation.

Whereas de Man’s deconstruction of autobiography turned out to be of little lasting impact, Lejeune’s theory of the “autobiographical pact” has proven seminal. It rethinks autobiography as an institutionalized communicative act where author and reader enter into a particular ‘contract’—the “autobiographical pact”—sealed by the triple reference of the same proper name. “Autobiography (narrative recounting the life of the author) supposes that there is identity of name between the author (such as s/he figures, by name, on the cover), the narrator of the story and the character who is being talked about” ( [1987] 1988 : 12; see Genette [1991] 1993 ) . The author’s proper name refers to a singular autobiogra­phical identity, identifying author, narrator and protagonist as one, and thus ensures the reading as autobiography. “The autobiographical pact is the affirmation in the text of this identity, referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover” (14). The tagging of the generic status operates by way of paratextual pronouncements or by identity of names; in contrast, nominal differentiation or content clues might point to fiction as worked out by Cohn ( 1999 ).

While Lejeune’s approach reduces the issue of fiction vs non-fiction to a simple matter of pragmatics, he acknowledges its own historical limitations set by the “author function” (Foucault [1969] 1979 ) along with its inextricable ties to the middle-class subject. As an ideal type, Lejeune’s autobiographical pact depends on the emergence of the modern author in the long 18th century as proprietor of his or her own text, guaranteed by modern copyright and marked by the title page/the imprint. In this sense, the history of modern autobiography as literary genre is closely connected to the history of authorship and the modern subject and vice versa, much as the scholarship on autobiography has emerged contemporaneously with the emergence of the modern author (Schönert → Author ).

In various ways, then, autobiography has proved prone to be to “slip[ping] away altogether,” failing to be identifiable by “its own proper form, terminology, and observances” (Olney ed. 1980 : 4). Some critics have even pondered the “end of autobiography” (e.g. Finck 1999 : 11). With critical hindsight, the classic paradigm of autobiography, with its tenets of coherence, circular closure, interiority, etc., is exposed as a historically limited, gendered and socially exclusive phenomenon (and certainly one that erases any clear dividing line between factual and fictional self-writings).

As its classic markers were rendered historically obsolete or ideologically suspicious (Nussbaum 1989 ), the pivotal role of class (Sloterdijk 1978 ), and especially gender, as intersectional identity markers within specific historical contexts came to be highlighted, opening innovative critical perspectives on strategies of subject formation in ‘canonical’ texts as well as broadening the field of autobiography studies. While ‘gender sensitive’ studies initially sought to reconstruct a specific female canon, they addressed the issue of a distinct female voice of/in autobiography as more “multidimensional, fragmented” (Jelinek ed. 1986 : viii), or subsequently undertook to explore autobiographical selves in terms of discursive self-positionings instead (Nussbaum 1989 ; Finck 1999 : esp. 291–93), tying in with discourse analytical redefinitions of autobiography as a discursive regime of (self-)discipline and regulation that evolved out of changes in communication media and technologies of memory during the 17th and 18th centuries (Schneider 1986 ). Subsequently, issues of publication, canonization and the historical nexus of gender and (autobiographical) genre became subjects of investigation, bringing into view historical notions of gender and the specific conditions and practices of communication within their generic and pragmatic contexts (e.g. Hof & Rohr eds. 2008 ). The history of autobiography has come to be more diverse and multi-facetted: thus alternative ‘horizontal’ modes of self, where identity is based on its contextual embedding by way of diarial modes, have come to the fore. With respect to texts by 17th-century autobiographers, the notion of “heterologous subjectivity”— self-writing via writing about another or others—has been suggested (Kormann 2004 : 5–6).

If gender studies exposed autobiography’s individualist self as a phenomenon of male self-fashioning, postcolonial theory further challenged its universal validity. While autobiography was long considered an exclusively Western genre, postcolonial approaches to autobiography/ life writing have significantly expanded the corpus of autobiographical writings and provided a perspective which is critical of both the eurocentrism of autobiography genre theory and the concepts of selfhood in operation (e.g. Lionett 1991 ). In this context, too, the question has arisen as to how autobiography is possible for those who have no voice of their own, who cannot speak for themselves (see Spivak’s ‘subaltern’). Such ‘Writing ordinary lives’, usually aiming at collective identities, poses specific problems: sociological, ethical and even aesthetic (see Pandian 2008 ).

Following the spatial turn, the concept of ‘eco-autobiography’ also carries potentially wider theoretical significance. By “mapping the self” (Regard ed. 2003 ), eco-biography designates a specific mode of autobiography that constructs a “relationship between the natural setting and the self,” often aiming at “discover[ing] ‘a new self in nature’” (Perreten 2003 ), with Wordsworth or Thoreau ( [1854] 1948 ) as frequently cited paradigms. Phrased in less Romantic terms, it locates life courses and self-representations in specific places. In a wider sense, eco- or topographical autobiographies undertake to place the autobiographical subject in terms of spatial or topographical figurations, bringing into play space/topography as a pivotal moment of biographical identity and thus potentially disturbing autobiography’s anchorage in time. In any case, the prioritizing of space over time seems to question, if not to reverse, the dominance of temporality in autobiography and beyond since 1800.

Whatever the markers of difference and semantic foci explored, the notion of autobiography has shifted from literary genre to a broad range of cultural practices that draw on and incorporate a multitude of textual modes and genres. By 2001, Smith and Watson (eds. 2001 ) were able to list fifty-two “Genres of Life Narrative” by combining formal and semantic features. Among them are narratives of migration, immigration or exile, narratives engaging with ethnic identity and community, prison narratives, illness, trauma and coming-out narratives as much as celebrity memoirs, graphic life writing and forms of Internet self-presentation. These multiple forms and practices produce, or allow critics to freshly address, new ‘subject formations’ within specific historical and cultural localities. Finally, scholars have engaged with the role of aesthetic practices that “turn ‘life itself’ into a work of art,” developing “ zoegraphy as a radically post-anthropocentric approach to life narrative” (van den Hengel 2012 : 1), part of a larger attempt to explore auto/biographical figures in relation to concepts of “posthumanism.”

Related Terms

Whereas autobiography, as a term almost synonymous with life writing, signifies a broad range of ‘practices of writing the self’ including pre-modern forms and epistolary or diarial modes, ‘classic’ autobiography hinges upon the notion of the formation of individual identity by means of narrative. With its historical, psychological and philosophical dimensions, it differs from related forms such as memoirs and res gestae. Memoirs locate a self in the world, suggesting a certain belonging to, or contemporaneity with, and being in tune with the world (Neumann 1970 ). However, all these forms imply a certain claim to non-fictionality which, to a certain degree only, sets them off from autobiographical fiction/the autobiographical novel, with highly blurred boundaries and intense generic interaction (Müller 1976 ; Löschnigg 2006 ).

Biography is used today both as a term synonymous with “life writing” (hence the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 1978ff. ) as well as denoting hetero biography, i.e. the narrative of the life of another. (The term “life writing“ also includes heterobiography.) While in narratological terms experimental forms of autobiography may collapse the conventional 1st- vs 3rd-person boundary (§ 2), viewing the self as other, hetero­biography has generated its own distinct poetics and theory, extending from an agenda of resemblance as “the impossible horizon of biography” (“In biography , it is resemblance that must ground identity”; Lejeune [1987] 1988 : 24) to specific considerations of modes of representing the biographical subject, of biographical understanding, or knowledge, and the ethics of heterobiography (Eakin ed. 2004 ; Phelan → Narrative Ethics ).

Topics for Further Investigation

The intersections of hetero- and autobiography remain to be further explored. Significantly, ‘natural’ narratology’s theorizing of vicarious narration and the evolution of FID (Fludernik 1996 ) makes the limits of non-fictional heterodiegetic narration discernible: in its conventional form and refraining from speculative empathy, it must ultimately fail to render “experientiality” or resort to fiction, while autobiography’s experiential dimension invites further investigation (Löschnigg 2010 ). Additional study of the experimental interactions of life writing with no clear dividing lines between auto- and hetero-biography might yield results with interdisciplinary repercussions.

Finally, the field of self-representation and life writing in the new media calls for more research from an interdisciplinary angle.

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Further Reading

• Jolly, Margaretta, ed. (2001). Encyclopaedia of Life Writing . London: Fitzroy Dearborn.
• Schwalm, Helga (2014). “Autobiography/Autofiction.” M. Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.). Handbook Autobiography/Autofiction . Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming.
• Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina (2000). Autobiographie . Stuttgart: Metzler.

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Autobiographical Narrative

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• Andrea Smorti   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0628-1881 2  

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The transition from autobiographical memory to autobiographical narrative is marked by a series of transformations. First of all, the emission of the voice transforms sensations and thoughts into sound waves that must be emitted one after the other. Then these sound waves are transformed into signs of the spoken language (words). Thought, so silent and syncretic, becomes more explicit when it is communicated because it takes on a public linguistic format. By becoming language, thought is divided into a more superficial aspect (the sign) and a deeper aspect (the meaning). All this allows a new awareness. In fact, to externalize one’s thought means being able to make one’s interiority communicable while respecting, at least to a certain extent, the needs of the world in which one lives. It is then necessary to pay attention to the choice of vocabulary, to the construction of sentences, to the use of rhetorical artifices, to the way of interacting by coordinating verbal and nonverbal communication, what one wants to say and how one wants to say it. When this language takes on a narrative structure and function, further transformations are imposed because the stories are endowed with properties and constraints to be respected if one wants to be understood and interesting to the interlocutor. Then, the existence of autobiographical genres allow people to use models to become inspired in order to be able to make their memories fully understandable to themselves and to others.

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G.B. Vico had arrived at a very similar vision considering how the mind and the body find their point of contact in an incorporated linguistic faculty, “being man, properly, that mind, body and speech, and speech being placed between the mind and the body” (Vico 1744 , 666). Thus, favella (language) represents the starting point for a rethinking of the nature of man that abandons the old dualisms, that omits the problematic relationship between mind and body, and that captures the specific nature of man in the linguistic element. This new linguistic res is not only language in the sense of articulated language but it is also a contemporary visual language—composed of real words and realized through acts, hints and gestures—in which the fantastic aspect and the corporeal element play a predominant role.

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Smorti, A. (2020). Autobiographical Narrative. In: Telling to Understand. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43161-7_4

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Part I investigates a wide range of autobiographies, alongside work on the history and literary criticism of autobiography, on narrative, and on the philosophies of the self and of the good life. It works from the point of view of the autobiographer, and considers what she does, what she aims at, and how she achieves her effects, to answer three questions: what is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? About what subjects does autobiography teach? This part of the book develops, first, an account of autobiography as paradigmatically a narrative artefact in a genre defined by its form: particular diachronic compositional self-reflection . Second, an account of narrative as paradigmatically a generic telling of a connected temporal sequence of particular actions taken by, and particular events which happen to, agents . It defends rationalism about autobiography : autobiography is in itself a distinctive and valuable form of ethical reasoning, and not merely involved in reasoning of other, more familiar kinds. It distinguishes two purposes of autobiography, self-investigation and self-presentation . It identifies five kinds of self-knowledge at which autobiographical self-investigation typically aims— explanation, justification, self-enjoyment, selfhood , and good life —and argues that meaning is not a distinct sixth kind. It then focusses on the book’s two main concerns, selfhood and good life: it sets out the wide range of existing accounts, taxonomies , and tasks for each, and gives an initial characterisation of the self-realization account of the self and its good which is defended in Part II.

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Reading Autobiography Now

An updated guide for interpreting life narratives, third edition.

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Updated and expanded, Reading Autobiography Now is an accessible and contemporary guide to autobiographical narratives. Exploring definitions of life narrative, probing issues of subjectivity, and outlining salient features of autobiographical arts and practices, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson offer both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field.

This book offers a superb wayfinder through the rich and strange forest of life writing and its many forms of art. Bringing decades of wisdom as leaders in this multidisciplinary field, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have wonderfully updated this latest edition, with attention to multimedia and digital life narrative, nobody memoir, autographics, ecocriticism, sex and gender narrative, dementia recordings, and much more. Those with time will enjoy theoretical debates on embodiment, epistemology, experience, and identity; seekers in a hurry have mini-essays for quick marveling at autobiography now.

Margaretta Jolly, director, Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, University of Sussex

Literature , Creative Nonfiction , Reference , American Literature

The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners.

$27.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1688-6 $108.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1687-9 400 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, July 2024

Sidonie Smith is Lorna G. Goodison Distinguished University Professor Emerita of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Among her almost two dozen books are Manifesto for the Humanities and, with Julia Watson, Life Writing in the Long Run .

This third edition of the most comprehensive, provocative, and useful guide to life narratives updates its chapters on autobiography, extends its international reach, and expands its coverage of the stunning range of genres, media, and hybrid forms increasingly occupying the forefront of life-writing studies. This book is what theorists, critics, teachers, and students need now .

Craig Howes, director, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

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IResearchNet

Autobiographical Narratives

Autobiographical narratives definition.

Autobiographical narratives are the stories people remember (and often tell) about events in their lives. Some autobiographical narratives refer to memories of important personal events, like “my first date” or “the day my father died.” Others may seem trivial, like a memory of yesterday’s breakfast. Many psychologists study the extent to which memories of personal events are accurate. They ask questions like these: How true is the memory? Is the story a distortion of what really happened? Other psychologists are interested in what autobiographical narratives say about a person’s self-understanding or about social life and social relationships more generally. Their questions include these: What does a particular memory mean for the person remembering it? How do people use autobiographical narratives in daily life?

What Do We Remember?

Many psychologists see autobiographical memory as an active and creative process. People construct memories by (a) attending to certain features of a to-be-remembered event, (b) storing information about that event according to personally meaningful categories and past experiences, (c) retrieving event information in ways that help solve social problems or meet situational demands, and (d) translating the memory of the event into a coherent story. What people attend to, how they store autobiographical information, what they eventually retrieve from their memory, and how this all gets told to other people are all influenced by many different factors in the person’s life and social world, including especially a person’s goals. For example, a person whose life goal is to become a physician may have constructed especially vivid personal memories of interacting with doctors and nurses growing up, positive experiences with biology and the health sciences, and episodes of helping other people. Autobiographical narratives provide a ready supply of episodic information that people may consult in making important decisions about the future.

Autobiographical Narratives Development and Functions

Most people can recall virtually nothing from before the age of 2 years. Autobiographical memory begins to manifest itself in the third and fourth year of life as young children begin to form simple memories about events that have happened to them. Parents, siblings, and teachers often provide considerable assistance in the development of early autobiographical memory. They will ask young children to recall recent events (yesterday’s trip to the park, Sarah’s birthday party) and encourage them to relate the event as a story. By the age of 5, most children are able to tell coherent stories about events in their lives, complete with setting, characters, plot, and a sense of beginning, middle, and end. As children move through elementary school, their autobiographical memories become more complex and nuanced.

In adolescence and young adulthood, people begin to organize memories of particular personal events into larger, integrative life stories. These internalized and developing life stories may serve as expressions of narrative identity. In other words, people’s life stories— their autobiographical understandings of their lives as a whole—help to provide their lives with meaning and direction, explaining in story form how they believe they came to be who they are today and where they believe their life may be headed in the future. Life stories continue to develop as people move through their adulthood years, reflecting new experiences and challenges as well as their ever-changing understanding of the past. An adult’s life story may contain many key scenes, such as especially important early memories, high points, low points, and turning points. While these important scenes may originate from almost any point in the life span, research shows that people tend to have an especially large number of emotionally vivid autobiographical recollections from their late-adolescent and early-adult years—memories of events that took place between the ages of about 15 and 25.

People often share their stories of important personal events with friends and acquaintances. Personal storytelling, therefore, often promotes interpersonal intimacy. Parents often tell their children stories from their own past, teachers often employ autobiographical narratives to promote learning in the classroom, and many adults see personal narratives as effective vehicles for socialization and imparting moral lessons for young people. The stories people tell about their own lives, furthermore, reflect the values and norms of their culture. For example, research suggests that American children tend to develop more elaborate personal memories than do Japanese and Chinese children, arguably reflecting a Western emphasis on the full expression of the individual self (over and against an East Asian emphasis on the collective). Stories are shaped by social class and gender: Working-class people prefer certain kinds of stories about the self while upper-middle-class people may prefer others; women and men are expected to tell different stories about their lives. In important ways, autobiographical memories reflect what has actually happened in a person’s life. But they are also strongly shaped by a person’s values and goals; the people with whom, and the occasions wherein, personal stories are told; and the broad forces of social class, gender, religion, society, and culture.

References:

• McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100-122.
• Thorne, A. (2000). Personal memory telling and personality development. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 45-56.
• Social Psychology Research Methods