Autobiographies

A detailed Summary of Autobiographies

"Any life story, written or oral, more or less dramatically, is in one sense a personal mythology, a self-justification", write Raphael Samuels & Paul Thompson. "Any autobiographical narrative doubles as a morality; and this can be discerned not only in its shaping, but in the mythical elements which may be juxtaposed with unique personal memory". In short, the mythical elements in memory need to be seen both as evidence of the past and as a continuing historical force in the present.

In England from the late nineteenth century onwards successful actors were particularly prone to record their lives for an admiring public. Their autobiographies often follow conventional narrative patterns and incorporate the mythologysing and self-justification to which Samuels and Thompson refer. Furthermore, their autobiographies not only function as an exercise in myth-making, but also as the performance in print of an already established public persona. Autobiography allows rge representation of a self already determined and constructed within a professional milieu circumscribed by the performative.

The extent to which an actor or actress achieves control or autonomy over self-construction and self-representation through the act of writi

It may be an important feature of autobiographical memories that they are never true in that they are literal interpretations of events, and in this respect it makes little sense to ask whether an autobiographical memory is true or false. Nevertheless, autobiographical memories may be accurate without being literal and may represent the personal meaning of an event at the expense of accuracy.

In many ways such a position effectively allows us to incorporate Samuels' and Thompson's notions that autobiography includes mythology, morality and self-justification in its narrative constructions. Memories are inevitably imprecise; "like paintings", says Conway, "they cannot be exactly copied.

Autobiography, according to Brewer, is diegetic rather than mimetic and is "an extension of fiction rather than the reverse...the shape of life comes first from imagination rather than experience".

The impossibility of autobiography ever achieving the authenticity to which it aspires is discussed by Jerome Bruner:

A series of omissions and denials - a process of marginalising self in the very process of putting forward a surrogate self or protagonist in the autobiography. Paradoxically, the writing of an autobiography becomes a mode of self-denial.

That is all she says about being Jewish; in effect, it is as if she wishes to acknowledge and then erase her heritage. (cf Chance Newton)

A central problem of autobiographical memory is its lack of verdicality. In his book on the topic Conway writes:

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Approximate Word count = 1129
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous