Junu Rai 2023

Life Writing

Life Narrative: Definitions and Distinctions

• De ning Kinds of Life Writing
- In self-referential writing, the writer serves as both the observer and the subject of investigation,
remembrance, and contemplation.
- The term 'autobiography' originates from Greek, combining autos (self), bios (life), and graphe
(writing), encompassing the idea of 'self-life writing' as a concise de nition.
- The term 'autobiography' was initially introduced in the preface to a collection of poems by Ann
Yearsley, an English working-class writer from the eighteenth century. However, some scholars
attribute the rst English usage of the term to Robert Southey, who anglicized the Greek words in
1809.
- Although the term "autobiography" was coined relatively recently, it does not imply that the practice
of self-referential writing originated only in the late eighteenth century.
- Throughout history, writers used terms like memoir, the life, the book of my life, confessions, or
essays of myself to explore self-reference, while the emergence of new terms since the eighteenth
century requires careful distinctions among life writing, life narrative, and autobiography.
- Life writing encompasses di erent types of written works focusing on a person's life, like biographies,
novels, or historical accounts. Life narrative is a more speci c term that includes self-referential
writing, like autobiographies. Autobiography emerged during the Enlightenment and is widely
recognized in the Western literary canon. It celebrates the individual's autonomy and presents a
universal life story.

• Life Narrative and Biography

- Life narrative and biography are two ways of narrating lives, but they have distinct approaches. In
biography, scholars document and interpret others' lives from an external perspective. On the other
hand, in life narrative, individuals write about their own lives, sometimes using the third person, and
consider both external and internal viewpoints. The life narrator faces two aspects: the self perceived
by others - the social, historical person with achievements, appearance, and relationships - re ecting
their real-life attributes. Additionally, there is the self experienced internally, which remains
inaccessible to the writer's external viewpoint.
- Biography and life narrative are also distinguished by their relationship with time and timing. For a
biographer, the subject's death does not mark the end of the narrative. They have the exibility to
write a biography during the subject's lifetime or after their death. In fact, biographies presenting
varying interpretations of historical gures may emerge periodically across many centuries. In
contrast, for the life narrator, death signi es the nality of the story. While a life narrative can span a
signi cant period, it must be written within the writer's lifetime or be published posthumously as it
was originally composed.
- When it comes to writing a life, the life narrator and the biographer rely on di erent types of evidence.
Biographers typically gather various forms of evidence, such as historical documents, interviews, and
family archives, which they evaluate for credibility. Unless they had a personal relationship with the
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 subject, biographers rarely rely on their own memories as reliable evidence. In contrast, life narrators
primarily draw upon their personal memories as the main archival source. They may also use other
sources like letters, journals, photographs, and conversations, as well as their understanding of the
historical context. In autobiographical narratives, the act of remembering intersects with rhetorical
techniques such as assertion, justi cation, judgement, conviction, and interrogation. Life narrators
address readers with the aim of persuading them to accept their version of events and experiences.
- The biographer typically writes about the subject of their study in the third person, while the life
narrator often uses the rst person. The biographer is generally unable to present the subject in the
rst person, except when quoting statements, letters, or books written by the subject themselves.
This distinction highlights how the biographer maintains a certain level of objectivity by employing a
detached perspective, whereas the life narrator brings a more personal and subjective element to
their narrative by using the rst-person point of view.

• Life Narrative and the Novel

- Both life narrative and the novel share common elements typically associated with ctional writing,
such as plot, dialogue, setting, and characterization. These features contribute to the storytelling
aspect of both forms. In recent times, many contemporary writers have shown a keen interest in
blurring the boundaries between life narrative and rst-person narration in novels.
- In the nineteenth century, novels often presented ctional characters' life stories as autobiographical
narratives (Charles Dicken’s David Copper eld, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) . This continued in the
twentieth century, with many novels narrated as rst-person autobiographies (J. D. Salinger’s Catcher
in the Rye, Jamica Kincaid’s Autobiography of my Mother). However, one way readers can tell they
are reading a novel and not a real autobiography is by noticing that the author's name on the title
page is di erent from the name of the character telling the story. This distinction helps readers
understand that they are entering the realm of ction rather than a genuine personal account.
- According to Philippe Lejeune, autobiography di ers from the novel in two main ways. First,
autobiographies include the author's personal details like birth date, birthplace, and education, which
add authenticity. Second, there is an implied agreement between the author and publisher that the
narrative is truthful. As readers, we approach autobiographies di erently, understanding that they
make truth claims even though they are presented in a ctional form.
- There is a temporal distinction between novels and autobiographical texts. Novelists have the
freedom to place their narratives in any historical timeframe, whether it's in the past, present, or
future. On the other hand, life narrators are often expected to present their narratives in a
retrospective manner, following the chronological order of their life up to the point of writing. However,
life narrators can also venture into the distant past, exploring cultural contexts even before the
author's birth, or even envision imaginative journeys into the future. Unlike novelists, life narrators
need to ground their narratives in their speci c temporal, geographical, and cultural surroundings, as
they draw from their own lived experiences.
- Novelists are focused on creating a consistent and believable ctional world that meets the
expectations of readers. They don't have to follow real-world evidence or historical facts. On the other
hand, autobiographical narrators draw from their own experiences and memories, referring to the real
world outside the text. They need to stay true to their personal memories, while novelists don't have
the same obligation.

• Life Narrative and History

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- Autobiographical narratives are sometimes interpreted as historical documents. While they can be
seen as a personal history of the author, they cannot be solely understood as a historical record.
Although autobiographical narratives may include factual information, they do not provide a strictly
factual account of a speci c time, person, or event. Instead, they o er a subjective "truth" rather than
objective “fact."
- The distinction in terms of temporality between autobiographical writings and historical narratives lies
in their respective frameworks. Autobiographical writings focus on the author's lifespan, while
historical narrative takes place in collective time. Autobiographical narrative may not engage the
historically signi cant moments.
- Autobiography and history use personal narrative di erently. The discipline requires historians to be
objective and truthful. They preserve this objectivity and truthfulness by maintaining a distance from
their material and removing or qualifying any reference of themselves in the narrative. Thus, while
historians are writers assembling a story about the past from archives available to them, they must
place themselves outside or at the margin of the historical picture. But autobiographical narrators are
at the center of the historical pictures they assemble and are interested in the meaning of larger
forces, or conditions, or events for their own stories.

Autobiographical Subjects
Our sense of self, called autobiographical subjectivity, comes from important parts like memory,
experiences, identity, embodiment, and agency.

Memory plays a crucial role in the process of writing an autobiography. The autobiographical writer
relies on their access to memory to construct a retrospective narrative of their past experiences and to
situate their present within that personal history. Memory serves as both the source and authenticator of
autobiographical acts.

However, it is important to recognize that memory is not a perfect replica of past events. When we
remember, we engage in a process of reinterpretation, actively creating meaning from the past in the
present moment. Daniel L. Schacter suggests that memories are records of our subjective experience of
events, rather than exact replicas of the events themselves. As a result, when narrating memories,
individuals inevitably organize and shape fragmented recollections into complex constructions that
become stories of their lives.

The act of remembering is also in uenced by historical and cultural factors. How people remember,
what they remember, and who does the remembering are all historically speci c. Memory is contextual,
taking place within particular sites and circumstances. In the context of autobiographical narrative, the
memories invoked are speci c to the time of writing and the contexts in which they are shared or told.

Remembering is not solely an individual or private activity, but a collective one. Memory is situated
within cultural politics and is in uenced by struggles over who has the authority to remember and what
should be remembered or forgotten. Communities of memory, such as religious, racial, ethnic, or familial
groups, develop their own rituals, practices, and sites of remembering. Autobiographical writers often
draw from multiple sources of memory, including personal ones like dreams, family albums, or objects,
as well as public sources such as documents, historical events, or collective rituals. Acts of
remembering are fundamentally social and collective, shaping how individuals understand the past and
assert their own versions of it.

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 Memory is intimately connected to materiality. It is evoked by sensory experiences and encoded in
objects or events that hold particular meaning for the narrator. The material aspects of memory
contribute to its preservation and retrieval, allowing the autobiographical writer to access and
communicate their recollections.

Lastly, memory and trauma are closely intertwined. Those who have experienced trauma may be
haunted by memories that persistently intrude upon their present experiences. Traumatic memories can
disrupt the present moment and demand attention. In such cases, autobiographical acts can serve as a
therapeutic intervention, allowing individuals to confront and process their traumatic memories within
the narrative framework of their life story.

Experience involves interpreting the past and understanding our role in a culturally and historically
signi cant present. It's how individuals evolve into speci c subjects, embracing distinct identities within
the social realm. These identities form through material, cultural, economic, and interpersonal
connections. Autobiographical subjects acknowledge that their self-perception is in uenced by
particular types of experiences connected to their social status and identities.

Individuals understand themselves through language, as experience is shaped by discourse, embedded

in the languages of everyday life and the knowledge produced at everyday sites. Our self-awareness, or
how we experience ourselves, is constructed through various domains of discourse. However, these
discourses are tied to speci c historical contexts, and the de nition of experience changes over time.

The discursive nature of experience requires us to be self-re exive about what we understand as “our
experience.” In autobiographical acts, narrators become readers of their experiential histories, bringing
discursive schema that are culturally available to them.

In autobiographical acts, the narrator's personal experience serves as the main evidence. This
experience establishes the narrator as a distinct and credible authority, inviting readers to view them as
knowledgeable. This authority is asserted both explicitly (persona outside dominant culture, unknown
and marginalized) and implicitly (public gures and celebrities) by the narrators.

Identity in autobiographical acts is established through identi cation and di erentiation. Identity forms
within groups and is in uenced by cultural variations. Identities are marked in terms of many categories:
gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, class, generation, family genealogy, and religious and
political ideologies. Identity based on di erences also signi es identity rooted in similarities.

Social structures and symbolic exchanges are constantly changing, suggesting that identities are not
xed but rather temporary and conditional. Because of constant placement and displacement of “who”
we are, identities can be thought of as multiple, contextual, contested and contingent.

Identities are constructed, expressed in language, and shaped by discourse. They are not inherent or
essential, despite societal tendencies to perceive them as xed and given. Identity is a category of
consciousness that emerges through dialogue and engagement with the discourses that surround
individuals.

Identities are shaped by the speci c temporal and spatial contexts in which individuals exist. Individuals
possess multiple intersecting identities that cannot be examined or understood in isolation from one
another.

Embodiment refers to the connection between our physical bodies and our sense of self. Our bodies
hold memories and become the canvas for life stories. This happens because memories are connected
to the body, and life stories come from embodied subjects.

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 Life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body. The ability to
recover memories depends upon the material body. There must be a body that perceives and
internalizes the images, sensations, and experiences of the external world. Memories are created as the
subject reconstructs a sense of identity while engaging with the world in symbolic exchange. Embodied
subjects are located in their bodies and through their bodies in culturally speci c ways.

Cultural discourses determine which parts of bodies are meaningful. They also decide when and how
bodies become visible, and that visibility means. This involves viewing the body as a neurochemical
system, an anatomical body, or a sociopolitical body.

The cultural meanings assigned to particular bodies a ect the kinds of stories people can tell. Bodily
centered crisis and trauma underscore the centrality of embodiment to the narratives of the body.

When it comes to agency, we view human beings as agents of or actors in their own lives, rather than
mere followers of social norms or unconscious carriers of cultural patterns and identity models.
Traditionally, autobiographies have been seen as stories of personal control and freedom. Yet, how
individuals assert, practice, and describe their agency is complex.

Multiple theoretical perspectives on agency exist, such as ideologies, transverse tactics and and modes
of disuse, the exible networks of language, the navigation of imagined communities, performativity,
psychic disidenti cation, the games of culture. These ideas provide ways to understand how individuals,
while narrating their lives, can change their stories, access alternative cultural patterns, view themselves
di erently, and exercise their agency.

Dimensions of autobiographical subjectivity: the psychic (memory), the temporal (experience), the
spatial (identity), the material (embodiment), and the transformative (agency).

Autobiographical Acts
An autobiographical act is a process of sharing personal experiences to convey one's identity and
perspectives.

Autobiographical acts are culturally and historically speci c. They are rhetorical as they are addressed to
an audience/reader; they are engaged in an argument about identity; and they are fractured by the play
of meaning.

Ken Plummer di erentiates three kinds of people who contribute to every story action:

a. The producer or teller of the story - autobiographical narrator.

b. The coaxer, the person or persons, or the institution, that elicits story from the speaker.

c. The consumers, readers, or audiences who interpret the story.

• The components of autobiographical acts - situational and interactional features

1. Coaxers, Coaches, and Coercers: Autobiographical acts occur when individuals are prompted or
compelled to share their life stories, with coaxers, coaches, and coercers playing di erent roles in
this process. Coaxers or coercers can be individuals, institutions, or cultural norms that invite or
provoke people to tell their stories. Intimate settings, religious in uences, or publishers inviting
celebrities are examples of situations where coaxing occurs. Coaxing holds signi cance in
collaborative life writing, where multiple individuals contribute to crafting the narrative. In this
process, an ethnographer conducts interviews and constructs the narrative from provided materials,
while an informant shares stories through interviews or informal conversations. An example of
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 coercion is editorial censorship, which can exert in uence in the narrative co-production. The role of
a coaxer in assembling a life narrative can sometimes lean more towards coercion than
collaboration. (In the realm of autobiographical acts, coaxers gently encourage individuals to share
their personal experiences, coaches provide guidance in crafting narratives, and coercers exert
pressure to compel sharing, potentially infringing on autonomy.)

2. Sites of Storytelling: coaxing and coercing occurs at particular sites of narration. Sites are Both
occasional, speci c to an occasion, and locational, emergent in a speci c mise en scene or context
of narration. The site is, rst, a literal place, and also a moment in history, a sociopolitical space in
culture. The appropriateness of personal narratives for particular sites is a crucial consideration.
Sites establish expectations about the kinds of stories that will be told and will be intelligible to
others. Occasional and locational, sites are multilayered matrices at which coaxing and narrating
take place. They may be personal, institutional, or geographical, and often these levels overlap. Site
speaks to the situatedness of autobiographical narration.

3. The Producer of the Autobiographical “I”: the autobiographical “I” is the producer of the story.
The “I” in a narrative is a marker of self-referentiality. The “I” who seems to be speaking is
comprised of multiple “I”s.

i. The “Real” or Historical “I” - The "real" or historical "I" is the authorial "I" responsible for creating
the autobiographical narrative. This historical persona has a life that is more diverse than what
the narrative portrays. The historical "I" exists within a speci c time and place, engaging in
everyday activities. Traces of this historical person's existence can be found in various records
such as government archives, religious institutions, family albums, and collective memories. This
evidence allows us to verify the historical "I's" existence. However, the historical "I" remains
unknown and unknowable to readers, distinct from the "I" presented in the autobiographical
narrative.

ii. The Narrating “I” - The "I" presented to readers in an autobiographical narrative is known as the
narrator or the narrating "I." This narrator is the one who desires or is compelled to share a
personal story. The narrating “I” is the agent of discourse, who selectively picks speci c aspects
of their life experience that are relevant to the narrative being told. While the narrating "I" typically
uses the rst-person perspective, it can also utilize third person or even "you" for self-reference.
This highlights that the narrating "I" is not a uni ed or stable entity. Instead, it is fragmented,
provisional, and subject to multiple perspectives, constantly evolving and dispersing throughout
the storytelling process.

iii. The Narrated “I” - The narrated "I" is the subject of history. The narrated "I" is the object “I” that
is being observed or portrayed. It is the protagonist of the narrative, the version of the self that
the narrating "I" chooses to construct for the reader through remembering. This "I" is the younger
version of the narrating "I." This "I" can be given a remembered or reimagined consciousness of
the experience of being a certain age. Both the narrating "I" in the temporal present and the
narrated "I"s of earlier times are multiple, fragmented, and heterogeneous.

iv. The Ideological “I” - The ideological “I” is the concept of personhood culturally available to the
narrator when he tells his story. It encompasses historical and cultural notions about individuals,
shaping how subjective experiences are understood. This includes aspects such as the person's
relationship with others and society, the signi cance of time and life stages, the impact of social
context, the motivations behind human actions, and the recognition of negative forces and
behaviors. Each autobiographical narrator is shaped by their unique historical and cultural
context, which in uences their outlook and experiences. The ideological "I" encompasses
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 multiple and sometimes con icting identities that are culturally present for the narrator. These
identities are shaped by factors such as gender, ethnicity, generation, family, sexuality, and
religion. Ideological "I"s serve as potential positions that autobiographical narrators can adopt,
challenge, modify, and engage with in speci c historical contexts. These positions are not xed
but rather multiple, exible, and subject to change.

4. Relationality and the Others of Autobiographical “I”s: In many autobiographical acts, the process
of self-inquiry and self-understanding is interconnected and in uenced by relationships with others.
This suggests that boundaries of an “I” are shifting and exible. The autobiographical "I" interacts
with di erent textual others in the narrative.

i. Historical Others - the identi able gures of a collective past. Such historical others often
serve as a generic models of identity culturally available to the narrator.

ii. Contingent Others - The individuals who populate the text as actors in the narrative but are
not deeply re ected upon.

iii. Signi cant Others - Individuals whose stories are intricately connected to the narrator's own,
shaping the narrator's self-understanding and identity formation.

a. In an autobiographical narrative, the stories of related others are embedded within the
context and extensively narrated. Eg.: family members

b. The narrative may also address and attribute special signi cance to an idealized absent
other. Eg.: God

c. The subject other is the other internal to every autobiographical subject.

5. The Addressee: The narrator always shares their story with someone. This person might be present
in the same room during an oral narrative or even implied in written storytelling. Sometimes, this
person could even be another version of the narrator themselves. This individual is referred to as the
addressee. Frequently, two types of addressees are distinguished. The narratee is the person who
the narrator is addressing in the story, even if not directly mentioned. The implied reader is the
hypothetical reader that the writer has in mind while creating the story, considering how they might
react to it. The implied readers to which self-referential modes are addressed vary across time,
cultures, and purposes. Speakers can imagine various addressees. They can be intimate, at some
distance, “God,” idealized addressee, particular persons who are at once speci c and universalized,
a universalized implied reader, and a category of people. Addressees can be imagined, and
addressed directly in the text or indirectly through the text. Often there are multiple addressees in
the narrative, narratees and implied readers addressed simultaneously or in sequence.

6. Structuring Modes of Self-inquiry: Autobiographical acts are investigations into and processes of
self-knowing. But both the modes of inquiry and the self-knowledge gained or produced change
over time and with cultural locations. The expression of self-knowledge is rooted in historical
backgrounds, and contemporary self-awareness di ers from past understandings found in works
like Socratic dialogues, Thomas a Kempis' "Imitatio Christi," or indigenous Australian Dreaming
rituals.
- Some individuals adopt speci c methods to examine their lives, and these approaches have
undergone signi cant changes across di erent times and contexts. John Donne’s self-questioning
sermons, Montaigne’s self-tryouts, W.B. Yeats’ mythical system are some of the examples. Some
well-known patterns for presenting processes of self-knowing are linked to other genres of
literature. Among them are Bildungsroman or narrative of social development, the Kunstlerroman or
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 narrative of artistic growth, the confession, memoir, conversion narrative, testimonio, and quest for
lost identity or a lost homeland or family.
- When engaging with autobiographical narratives, it is important to pay attention to the ways in
which the narrators examine themselves, re ect, and remember. These methods are conveyed
through the conventions of the genre. At times, the narrator focuses on speci c experiences or
types of knowledge. They may also question cultural knowledge valued during the time of writing.
Sometimes, the narrator establishes connections between understanding the world/others and
understanding oneself. In certain instances, they imagine alternative forms of knowledge. And
occasionally, they reject the idea of self-knowledge altogether.

7. Patterns of Emplotment: The way autobiographical narratives are structured can be categorized
into two types of patterns: temporal patterns, which organize the events based on time, and spatial
patterns, which involve the geographical aspects of the narrative's subject matter. Autobiographical
narratives can follow a chronological order, where the narrator recounts events in the order they
happened. However, this linear approach can be disrupted by non-chronological methods. A
narrator might use associative, digressive, or fragmented ways of remembering, using ashbacks
and ash-forwards to tell the story. Autobiographical stories are powerful ways to explore how
places connect to a person's sense of self. This connection is made through allegorical (using
symbols), imagistic (creating vivid mental images), and rhetorical (using persuasive language)
techniques. The narrator shifts between di erent roles in the story, which helps map out their
experiences and how they relate to di erent places.

8. The Medium: While we often associate autobiography with written narratives, self-presentation can
take various forms through di erent media. This includes short lms, documentaries, theater
performances, art installations, music, dance, self-portraits in painting or sculpture, quilts, collages,
body art, murals, comics, and even digital art.

9. The Consumer: The actual readers and listeners of a life narrative are the consumers. They are also
called audiences or esh-and-blood readers. When a person shares their life story in front of a live
audience, the audience responds in real time, often audibly. This immediate and audible response
from the audience has a direct impact on the presentation of the narrator's identity.The act of
narrating one's life story in front of an audience involves a performative aspect. This performance
aspect reduces the distance between the narrator, the narratee, the implied audience within the
narrative, and the consumer. However, it's important to note that the reading audiences are not
uniform groups. They come from di erent experiential histories and geopolitical spaces.

Life Narrative in Historical Perspective

Autobiographical subjects are produced.

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