Memoir

7 Key excerpts on "Memoir"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Histories of the Self

  Personal Narratives and Historical Practice

  • Penny Summerfield(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...4 Autobiography, Memoir and The Historian Social, cultural and economic historians have been attracted to Memoirs because they seem to overflow with information about people in the past. But at the same time as delighting in them, many have regarded them as presenting particular difficulties. Even the matter of terminology is less straightforward than it is with other genres of personal testimony. There is no agreed distinction between the terms Memoir and autobiography. ‘Memoir’ appears in the title of this chapter as an acknowledgement that ‘autobiography’, literally self-life-writing, is often deployed as a more general term, to include a wide range of genres for recording the history of the self, including some, like oral history and self-portraiture, that do not involve writing. 1 In some cases, ‘autobiography’ is used to refer to an account of a whole life, and ‘Memoir’ for narratives of a specific segment of the past. In practice, however, nearly all historians use the two terms interchangeably, as we shall see in the work discussed below. 2 Scholarship on autobiography and Memoir alerts us to a number of issues about the genre. 3 Foundational work by Philippe Lejeune proposes the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’, an unwritten agreement between the writer and their public that the autobiography is ‘true’. 4 Lejeune suggests that readers expect the contents of a Memoir, in contrast to those of a novel or short story, to ‘tell the truth’. Thus, autobiographical texts are read as referential, in the sense that the central character, the ‘I’ of the text, is assumed to be one and the same as the author. They are also read as reflexive, in that the author is expected to record, and reflect upon, his or her ‘real’ life in the pages of the Memoir. Numerous historians read Memoirs in this way, using autobiography as a source of factual evidence about the author, their experiences, and their social world...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Work of Life Writing

  Essays and Lectures

  • G. Thomas Couser(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...Nevertheless, an important conceptual distinction obtains: Memoir “presents”—and is therefore read—as a nonfictional record or re-presentation of actual humans’ experience. Fiction does not; it creates its own lifelike reality. And that makes all the difference. Memoir’s commitment to the real doesn’t just limit its content (what it can be about); it also limits its narrative techniques (how the content can be presented). Thus, narrative omniscience is generally not found in Memoir. The rootedness of Memoir in reality has ethical consequences, too. The ethical obligations of the novel are few: not to plagiarize, and not to libel. In contrast, the Memoirist has complex ethical obligations: to the historical record and, more important, to collaborators or subjects who are represented in the text. This special relation to the real affects what Memoir can do, too, not just what it is. In short, this distinction is fundamental both for how Memoir works (the craft of it) and for the work it does. What I mean by the work of Memoir, then, is not work as in “the work of art”—meaning the product of the writer’s labor, nor that labor itself. Rather, it is work in the sense of an act or deed, the effect of an agent or agency—the impact of Memoir on the world. When I discuss this, I find myself resorting to physical metaphors, like leverage and traction. The reason that I deferred the matter of work until I had placed Memoir in the larger category of what we call life writing is this: while Memoir and realistic fiction are often so similar as to be indistinguishable on the basis of internal evidence, Memoir—unlike the novel—is the literary form of something (life writing) that, in modern Western culture at least, most people are immersed in much of their lives. We write our lives—or they are written for us—from birth to death and in some cases beyond. Along the way, we produce, consume, or are represented in many of the forms of life writing that I listed earlier...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Developing Young Writers in the Classroom

  I've got something to say

  • Gail Loane(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...6 Memoir The polished lens of memory Memoir as narrative Most autobiographies are a series of Memoirs. If they were merely a chronological list of events remembered, they would probably never get into print. There are the predictable authors of autobiography – the celebrities, who have led an extraordinary life – but there are also many written by people who have lived a life which is very ordinary. What makes their stories reach publication, and become eminently readable, is the way that the writers have recognised themselves, and the way they felt and reacted, in the most ordinary as well as in extraordinary circumstances. Other people’s lives and their responses to the world interest us because we are part of that same world. We recognise sameness, even when the writer may have lived on the other side of the world and had quite a different upbringing from ourselves. This recognisable sameness became a valuable instrument in leading a twelve year-old student of mine to becoming a fully paid-up member of our writing team. She had arrived from another school, and was evidently feeling something of an outsider as she observed the writers’ workshop that was routine in our class: the jotting, the drafting, the sharing, the peer response, and so on. One day she decided that she too had a significant moment from her early years to recall in writing – a time when she had suffered the embarrassment of wetting her pants in the town’s main street. As she tentatively offered a draft of her personal story and I began to read, I was instantly reminded of a published Memoir of Maya Angelou I had just been reading. My student had recorded her own remembered event and had included the words I felt so embarrassed...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  What's the Big Idea?

  Nonfiction Condensed

  • Leslie Watts, Shelley Sperry, Shawn Coyne(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Story Grid Publishing LLC

    (Publisher)

  ...3 NARRATIVE NONFICTION If you’re a journalist, a Memoirist, a historian, or just someone who has a compelling tale to share with a broad audience, the narrative format is tailor-made for you. The subjects you can explore are endless, as long as there are connected characters and events. Usually, there’s some movement through time, but that doesn’t mean the events must be told in chronological order. In narrative nonfiction, the story is the star. You’ll use the tools and techniques of a fiction writer to tell a true story in a dramatic way that will grip readers’ imaginations. You’ll need to provide rich, specific details about the setting and cast of characters, and most importantly, a cathartic moment in the end, just like good novels have. Memoir, history, and journalism focused on politics, natural science, and social science are among the most popular kinds of narrative nonfiction, and they dominate the lists of prize-winning books each year precisely because they captivate readers. Some examples of recent masterworks in this category include Tara Westover’s Educated and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl (Memoirs); Taylor Branch’s Parting the Water s and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time (histories); and David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (science journalism). But if analyzing a phenomenon or problem is more important to you than telling a single compelling story, you’ll need the structure of a Big Idea book instead of a narrative....

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Documents in Crisis

  Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico

  • Beth E. Jörgensen(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  ...In reviewing the existing criticism, I encountered a general acknowledgment among scholars that in the world of literary history and analysis both in Mexico and in the United States, the fictional narrative genres of the novel and the short story regularly attract far more attention than the traditionally conceived nonfiction forms such as autobiography, biography, and chronicle. The extensive attention given to testimonial literature has been the outstanding exception to this rule in studies of Latin American literature of the past thirty years, 2 an exception that proved that nonfiction writing comprised a field of research with ample room to roam and to explore. The most acknowledged foundational account of the difference between fiction and nonfiction in the Western literary and philosophical tradition is the passage in Aristotle's Poetics in which he distinguishes between poetry and history writing. “It also follows from what has been said that it is not the poet's business to relate actual events, but such things as might or could happen in accordance with probability or necessity. A poet differs from a historian, not because one writes verse and the other prose … but because the historian relates what happened, the poet what might happen. This is why poetry is more akin to philosophy and is a better thing than history; poetry deals with general truths, history with specific events” (18)...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Transculturing Auto/Biography

  Forms of Life Writing

  • Rosalia Baena, Rosalia Baena(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...We are at a point in the development of the autobiography where the hybrid possibilities of life writing can and should be explored. Therefore, for readers of Prose Studies who expect to find traditional non-fictional prose, we offer a glimpse into the new ways and innovative approaches offered by "non-fictionality." Today, non-fictional prose is a fertile ground that blends fruitfully with new ways and forms, and, in this regard, the purpose of some of the contributions is to investigate the place where non-fictional prose merges with visual prose. The blurring of the traditional frontiers of genre can best be understood within the wider context of reflexivity that characterizes the contemporary use of autobiographical modes, thus resulting in a kind of meta-criticism of autobiographical practices. Marlene Kadar posits that life writing "may represent both a genre and a critical practice" (Kadar, 1992: 3); it is no longer a fixed term, but rather a term in flux as it moves from considerations of genre to considerations of critical practice. Kadar elaborates on the cultural possibilities enacted when we consider life writing a critical practice that encourages the reader to develop and foster his/her own self-consciousness to humanize and make the self-in-the-writing less abstract (Kadar, 1992: 12)...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  How to Read a Diary

  Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers

  • Desirée Henderson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...According to this wider view, diary fiction may also include stories in which a diary serves as an important plot point, even though the story never takes diary form and, as a result, the diary’s contents are concealed from the reader. This can include stories in which characters read, discuss, contemplate, search for, find, hide, or destroy diaries. The flexibility of the diary fiction label reflects the location of these works within the equally broad and flexible category of autobiographical fiction, works of fiction that either closely parallel the biography of the author or that borrow techniques from autobiography, usually with the intention of encouraging readers to view the story as being about the author’s real life. Sometimes referred to as autofiction, this category also includes fictional Memoir and biography, and epistolary fiction. While works of autobiographical fiction can be interpreted using the same techniques applied to general fiction, most scholars agree that readers must pay particular attention to the ways in which authors navigate between autobiography and fiction, utilizing both despite the fact that they may seem antithetical. This chapter prepares readers to interpret diary fiction by identifying the principal ways in which authors adapt the nonfiction diary in novels and short stories. Most literary criticism on this topic focuses on the diary novel, or novels in diary form, but I prefer the term diary fiction because it includes short stories, comics, and graphic novels, among other kinds of storytelling. While my discussion will primarily address novels and short stories, readers are encouraged to apply the terms and concepts outlined in this chapter widely, testing their relevance to audio, digital, performative, and visual texts that are inspired by diaries. I begin by providing a brief historical overview of diary fiction before outlining four major conventions of diary fiction...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book