Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction

Volume I: Theory and Concepts

Handbook of
Autobiography/Autofiction
Volume I: Theory and Concepts

Edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

ISBN 978-3-11-027971-9
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-027981-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038148-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, editor.
Title: Handbook of autobiography | autofiction / edited by Martina
Wagner-Egelhaaf.
Other titles: Autobiography | autofiction
Description: First edition. | Boston ; Berlin : De Gruyter, 2018. | Series:
De Gruyter handbook | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017844 (print) | LCCN 2018021484 (ebook) | ISBN
9783110279818 (electronic Portable Document Format (pdf)) | ISBN
9783110279719 (hardback) | ISBN 9783110381481 (e-book epub))
Subjects: LCSH: Autobiography. | Autobiographical fiction. | Autobiography in
literature. | Biography as a literary form. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY &
AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
Classification: LCC CT25.H36 2018 (ebook) | LCC CT25.H36 2018 (print) | DDC
920--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017844

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Cover image: M.C. Escher’s “Hand with Reflecting Sphere” © 2017 The M.C. Escher Company –
The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com.
Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde
Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

www.degruyter.com
Contents

Vol. I: Theory and Concepts of Autobiography/Autofiction

Preface: The Concept of this Handbook XV

Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines –

Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf 1

1 Theoretical Approaches 9
1.1 Anthropology – Deborah Reed-Danahay 11
1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience – Hans J. Markowitsch and
Angelica Staniloiu 18
1.3 Cultural Studies – Michaela Holdenried 30
1.4 Deconstruction – Linda Anderson 39
1.5 Discourse Analysis – Manfred Schneider 45
1.6 Gender Studies – Anne Fleig 54
1.7 Hermeneutics – Ulrich Breuer 64
1.8 History – Volker Depkat 73
1.9 History of Art – Gerd Blum 82
1.10 Media Studies – Matthias Christen 94
1.11 Narratology – Martin Löschnigg 103
1.12 Philosophy – Dieter Thomä 111
1.13 Political Science – Tracey Arklay 122
1.14 Postcolonialism – Mita Banerjee 130
1.15 Psychology – Rüdiger F. Pohl 136
1.16 Psychoanalysis – Christine Kirchhoff and Boris Traue 148
1.17 Religious Studies – Jens Schlamelcher 156
1.18 Rhetoric – Melanie Möller 165
1.19 Social History – Helga Schwalm 175
1.20 Sociology – Gabriele Rosenthal 182
1.21 Structuralism – Erik Martin 191
1.22 Theology – Thomas Kuhn 200

2 Categories 209
2.1 Apologia – Karl Enenkel 211
2.2 Authenticity – Michael Quante and Michael Kühler 216
2.3 Autobiographical Pact – Lut Missinne 222
2.4 Autobiography and the Nation – Lydia Wevers 228
2.5 Autoethnography – Christian Moser 232
2.6 Autofiction – Claudia Gronemann 241
VI Contents

2.7 Automediality – Christian Moser 247

2.8 Ego-documents – Volker Depkat 262
2.9 Ethics of Autobiography – Stephen Mansfield 268
2.10 Ethos and Pathos – Roman B. Kremer 275
2.11 Facts and Fiction – Volker Depkat 280
2.12 Gender – Angelika Schaser 287
2.13 Genealogy – Angelika Malinar 293
2.14 The (Term) ‘I’ – Michael Quante and Annette Dufner 300
2.15 Identity – Michael Quante and Annette Dufner 305
2.16 Individuality – Eric Achermann 310
2.17 Intentionality – Eric Achermann 320
2.18 Life and Work – Gabriele Rippl 327
2.19 Life Writing – Mita Banerjee 336
2.20 Memory – Angelika Schaser 342
2.21 Mimesis – Florian Klaeger 350
2.22 Minorities – Angelika Schaser 358
2.23 Paratext – Frauke Bode 364
2.24 Personality – Michael Quante, Annette Dufner,
and Michael Kühler 372
2.25 Prosopopoeia – Richard Block 378
2.26 Referentiality – Regine Strätling 384
2.27 The ‘Self’ – Michael Quante and Michael Kühler 390
2.28 Sincerity – Annette Dufner and Michael Kühler 398
2.29 Subjectivity – Dieter Thomä 402
2.30 Time and Space – Anne Fleig 410
2.31 Topics of Autobiography/Autofiction – Gabriele Linke 416
2.32 Trauma – Michaela Holdenried 423
2.33 Truth – Eric Achermann 429

3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres 435

3.1 Architecture – Salvatore Pisani 437
3.2 Autobiographical/Autofictional Comics – Martin Klepper 441
3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film – Matthias Christen 446
3.4 Autobiographical Music – Christiane Wiesenfeldt 456
3.5 Autobiographical Novel – Lut Missinne 464
3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry – Frauke Bode 473
3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting – Gerd Blum 485
3.8 Autobiography and Drama/Theatre – Anne Fleig 497
3.9 Autobiography – Helga Schwalm 503
3.10 Confessions – Ulrich Breuer 520
3.11 Conversations – Alexandra Georgakopoulou 532
3.12 Curriculum Vitae – Bernd Blöbaum 537
 Contents VII

3.13 Autobiography in/as Dance – Gabriele Brandstetter 542

3.14 Diary – Schamma Schahadat 547
3.15 Digital Life Narratives/Digital Selves/Autobiography on the Internet –
Innokentij Kreknin 557
3.16 Epistolary Autobiography – Karl Enenkel 565
3.17 Epitaph – Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen 579
3.18 Essay – Karin Westerwelle 584
3.19 Fake Autobiography – Richard Block 595
3.20 Fictional Autobiography – Hans Vandevoorde 603
3.21 Interview – Gabriele Rosenthal 611
3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS – Davide Giuriato 617
3.23 Memoirs – Christiane Lahusen 626
3.24 Metaautobiography – Christiane Struth 636
3.25 Oral Forms – Susanne Gehrmann 640
3.26 Photography – Matthias Christen 648
3.27 Self-Narration – Arnaud Schmitt 658
3.28 Self-Portrait – Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen 663
3.29 Testimony/Testimonio – Ulrich Mücke 669
3.30 Travelogue – Michaela Holdenried 675

Vol. II: History of Autobiography/Autofiction

Introduction: Autobiography Across the World, Or, How Not To Be Eurocentric –

Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf 683

1 The European Tradition 689

1.1 Antiquity – Melanie Möller 691
1.2 Middle Ages – Sonja Glauch 710
1.3 Early Modern Times 724
1.3.1 Autobiographies in the Latin Language (1300–1700) –
Karl Enenkel 724
1.3.2 Autobiographies in the Vernacular – Karin Westerwelle 732
1.4 Modernity – Michaela Holdenried 753
1.5 Postmodernity – Anna Thiemann 778

2 The Arab World – Susanne Enderwitz 805

2.1 Introduction 807
2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 827
2.3 Modern Autobiography 850
VIII Contents

3 Africa – Susanne Gehrmann 895

3.1 Introduction 897
3.2 Pre-colonial Times 901
3.3 Colonial Times 910
3.4 Post-colonial Times 923

4 Asia 965
4.1 India – Angelika Malinar 967
4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos – Vatthana Pholsena 985
4.3 Indonesia – Monika Arnez 1006
4.4 China – Reinhard Emmerich 1026
4.5 Japan – Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1059

5 Australia and New Zealand 1085

5.1 Australia – Kylie Crane 1087
5.2 New Zealand – Lydia Wevers 1114

6 The Americas 1141

6.1 Latin America – Ulrich Mücke 1143
6.2 North America – Alfred Hornung 1205

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World – Gabriele Rippl 1261

Vol. III: Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

Introduction: Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts, Or, How Not To Set

Up a Canon – Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf 1281

1 Isocrates: Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως (353 BCE) [Antidosis] and Lucian: Περὶ τοῦ
ἐνυπνίου (2nd Century) [Dream] – Peter von Möllendorff 1285
2 Plato: Άπολογία (3rd Century BCE) [Apology of Socrates] –
Thomas A. Blackson 1301
3 Sima Qian: 報任少卿書 [“The Letter to Ren An”] (93/91 BCE) and Other
Autobiographical Writings – Reinhard Emmerich 1312
4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V (8–12) [“Sorrows”] –
Melanie Möller 1328
5 Aurelius Augustinus: Confessiones (397–401) [Confessions] –
Christian Moser 1342
6 Izumi Shikibu: 和泉式部日記 (11th Century) [The Izumi Shikibu Diary] –
Judit Árokay 1359
 Contents IX

7 Muḥammad al-Ghazālī: ‫( المنقذ من الضالل‬5th/12th Century)

[Deliverance from Error and Attachment to the Lord of Might and
Majesty] – Susanne Enderwitz 1373
8 Francesco Petrarca: Secretum [My Secret; Secret Book]/De secreto-
conflictu curarum mearum (Mid-14th Century) [On the Secret Struggles
of My Mind] – Karl Enenkel 1386
9 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn: ‫( التعريف بابن خلدون‬8th/14th Century)
[The Autobiography] – Susanne Enderwitz 1397
10 Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur: ‫( بابر نامه‬First Third of 10th/16th Century
until 935/1529) [Baburnama] – Kristina Rzehak 1410
11 Teresa de Ávila: El Libro de la Vida (1562) [The Life of the Holy Mother
Teresa de Jesús] – Frauke Bode 1425
12 Michel de Montaigne: Les Essais (1580, 1588, 1595) [The Complete
Essays] – Karin Westerwelle 1439
13 Francisco Guerrero: El Viage a Hierusalem (1590)
[Voyage to Jerusalem] – Christiane Wiesenfeldt 1456
14 Avvakum Petrov: Житие протопопа Аввакума, им самим написанное
(17th Century) [Life of Avvakum] – Erik Martin 1470
15 John Bunyan: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) –
Martin Löschnigg 1485
16 Anne Halkett: The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett, 1677–78
(1875) – Helga Schwalm 1499
17 Glikl bas Judah Leib: Zikhroynes (1691–1719) [Memoirs] –
Richard Block 1511
18 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) –
Clare Brant 1525
19 Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791 sq.) –
Volker Depkat 1539
20 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Les Confessions [The Confessions]
(1782/1789) – Christian Moser 1554
21 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und
Wahrheit (1811–1833) [From My Life: Poetry and Truth] –
Jane K. Brown 1573
22 William Wordsworth: The Prelude (1850) – Helga Schwalm 1590
23 Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself
(1861) – Martin Klepper 1603
24 Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoy: Детство (1852) [Childhood] –
Erik Martin 1618
25 Ned Kelly: The Jerilderie Letter (1879) – Michael Farrell 1633
26 August Strindberg: Tjänstekvinnans son. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria
(1886) [The Son of a Servant] – Linda Haverty Rugg 1646
X Contents

27 Mark Twain: Autobiography of Mark Twain (1870–1910) –

Mita Banerjee 1659
28 Franz Kafka: Brief an den Vater (1919) [Letter to his Father] –
Michaela Holdenried 1672
29 Alban Berg: Lyric Suite (1925/1926) – Nicole Jost-Rösch 1688
30 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: શત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા આત્મકથા;
सत्य के प्रयोग अथवा आत्मकथा (1925–1928) [An Autobiography or The
Story of My Experiments With Truth] – Angelika Malinar 1703
31 Walter Benjamin: Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1930s)
[Berlin Childhood around 1900] – Michaela Holdenried 1719
32 Hu Shi: 四十自述 (1933) [An Autobiographical Account at Forty] and
胡適口述自傳 (1981) [The Reminiscences of Dr. Hu Shih] –
Yu Hong 1737
33 Anaïs Nin: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–1974) –
Gabriele Rippl 1750
34 Ajñeya: शॆखर एक जिवनी (1941/1944) [Śekhar: A Biography] –
Angelika Malinar 1762
35 Czesław Miłosz: Rodzinna Europa (1958) [Native Realm] –
Schamma Schahadat 1777
36 Karen Blixen: Out of Africa (1937) – Sophie Wennerscheid 1794
37 Michel Leiris: La Règle du Jeu (1948–1976) [The Rules of the Game] –
Regine Strätling 1806
38 Albert Memmi: La Statue de Sel (1953) [The Pillar of Salt] –
Claudia Gronemann 1822
39 Hal Porter: The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony: An Australian
Autobiography (1963) – Jack Bowers 1838
40 Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited (1966) –
Schamma Schahadat 1851
41 Frank Sargeson: Once is Enough (1973) – Lydia Wevers 1866
42 Roland Barthes: roland BARTHES par roland barthes (1975)
[Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes] – Regine Strätling 1878
43 Imre Kertész: Sorstalanság (1975) [Fateless/Fatelessness] –
Karl Katschthaler 1892
44 María Teresa León: Memoria de la Melancholia (1970)
[Memory of Melancholy] – Inke Gunia 1906
45 Wole Soyinka: Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981) –
Akin Adesokan 1921
46 Jeroen Brouwers: Bezonken Rood (1981) [Sunken Red] –
Lut Missinne 1932
47 Michael Ondaatje: Running in the Family (1982) –
Martin Löschnigg 1948
48 Sally Morgan: My Place (1987) – Martina Horáková 1963
 Contents XI

49 Serge Doubrovsky: Le Livre brisé (1989) [The Broken Book] –

Claudia Gronemann 1977
50 Elfriede Jelinek: Ein Sportstück (1998) [Sports Play] –
Anne Fleig 1989
51 Najīb Maḥfūẓ: ‫( أصداء السيرة الذاتية‬1994) [Echoes of an Autobiography] –
Susanne Enderwitz 2002
52 Walter Kempowski: Das Echolot (1993–2005) [Sonar] –
Angelika Schaser 2016
53 Gabriel García Márquez: Vivir Para Contarla (2002) [Living to Tell the
Tale] – Cornelia Sieber 2030
54 J. M. Coetzee: Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) –
Katja Sarkowsky 2049
55 Xavier Le Roy: Product of Circumstances (1998/1999) –
Gabriele Brandstetter 2064
56 Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) –
Martin Klepper 2074
57 Jane Alison: The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir (2009) –
Jack Bowers 2089

List of Contributors 2103

Subject Index 2105
Name Index 2132
Abbreviations
aet. Aetatis, in a certain year
aka also known as
BCE Before Common Era
ca. circa
CE Common Era
Ch. Chapter
dec. deceased
H for hijra, the prophet Mohammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina, marks the start of
the Islamic calender
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
n note
n.d. no date
nn notes
no(s). number(s)
n.pag. no pagination
r. reigned
s.l. no place of publication
n.p. no publisher
sq. subsequens
# strophe/stanza

For works by authors from antiquity cf. lists of common international abbreviations (Brill, Der Große
Pauly etc.).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-201
Preface: The Concept of this Handbook
This handbook on ‘Autobiography/Autofiction’ is a challenge – and a risk. When
Manuela Gerlof from de Gruyter proposed to edit a handbook on autobiography, I
hesitated at first. As I had already conducted quite a bit of research in the field of auto-
biography in the German speaking world and on the theory of autobiography, it did
not seem all that attractive to undertake another book on autobiography. However, the
project started to intrigue me when Dr. Gerlof suggested we publish the handbook in
English and place it on the international book market. Having previously dealt mostly
with German autobiographies and being familiar mainly with the Western tradition
of the genre, the idea of thinking about autobiography in a global and hence trans-
cultural perspective became more and more fascinating. I realized that I did not know
anything about autobiographical forms in non-Western cultures and I started to reflect
on the question of the extent to which the notion of ‘autobiography,’ at least in the
way we perceive of it in the West, can be considered as a specific Western product.
Of course, autobiographies have been and are being written all over the world. Being
aware that cultural exchange and hybridity are common features of a globalized
world, one has to ask what this means for the genre of autobiography, its different
cultural contexts and historical features. These and other enthralling questions finally
got the upper hand of my initial scepticism. So I accepted the challenge, although I
have always been aware that it will be impossible to represent a genre as mutable as
autobiography in a transhistorical global perspective. The idea that this project will
allow and necessitate intensive collaboration with autobiography researchers from all
over the world allayed the fears of failure. And of course, such a handbook combining
all these different approaches – theory, history, and analyses of individual texts – does
not yet exist and will be an invaluable tool for students and researchers alike.
The handbook presents the historical and conceptual variety of the autobiograph-
ical genre in three volumes. The outline of volume one is theoretical and systematic.
Its first section looks at autobiography from the perspective of different disciplines
and theoretical approaches. Although literary studies have been investigating the
form and historical appearance of autobiography extensively, other disciplines such
as history, psychology, religious studies, etc. use autobiographies as sources and
have developed their own concepts of the genre. In order to foster the interdiscipli-
nary discussion on autobiography it seems to be important to represent the views
and concepts of different disciplines. If a reader has the impression that an article
on literary studies is missing from the list of disciplines in the section on “Theoreti-
cal Approaches,” however, this is certainly due to the blind spot of the editor’s own
disciplinary background. For a literary scholar, the literary studies perspective con-
stitutes the ‘norm,’ whereas ‘other’ fields are ‘added’ to make the picture complete.
This unavoidable disciplinary centrism may be excused by referring to the different
methodological approaches that are explained in this first section of volume one as
well. They indicate, of course, not only the heterogeneity of approaches within literary

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-202
XVI Preface

studies but also forge connections to other disciplines and in this way promote inter-
disciplinary debate. The second section of volume one discusses categories which
hitherto have been applied to the study of autobiography/autofiction. The chapters
relate their focus on the autobiographical/autofictional to general literary and cul-
tural studies approaches and elaborate transdisciplinary perspectives. It is the aim
of the third section to display the multiplicity of autobiographical forms and genres
in the course of history as well as in the present time. The chapters demonstrate the
mutability of the genre with special emphasis on its media and intermedial aspects.
Volume two intends to trace the historical development of the autobiographical
genre. As one might imagine, doing so on a worldwide scale raises a fundamental yet
intriguing problem. Of course it is not possible to tell the history of a genre in a global
perspective by following a single timeline, as too many different cultural contexts
would have to be considered simultaneously. Therefore, the presentation is structured
by proceeding from continent to continent. This, of course, does not solve the problem
of concomitance and heterogeneity, yet it helps us to come to grips with it. But where
to start? Obviously, all the different options would be biased in some sense. How we
start and the routes we take mirror the prejudiced ways we see the world. It is not
possible to conceptualize any world order in a neutral way. The problem becomes
even more complicated when we look critically at the subject under consideration:
autobiographical/autofictional writing. The notion of autobiography that a European
literary scholar might develop is formed, at best, by what she considers ‘the European
tradition.’ Being academically and culturally socialized as European may cause her
to think that the concept of autobiography is a European one. She might be mistaken,
or she might have to alter her idea of ‘the autobiographical.’ In any case, she must be
aware of this specific Western view when looking for authentic forms of the autobi-
ographical in other cultures. Most likely to be found when looking across the globe
is a complex and multi-layered meshwork of different autobiographical and autofic-
tional forms and traditions, as cultures today as in the past are much more entangled
than we might suspect. This handbook, therefore, undertakes an experiment which
may lead to reconsidered notions of autobiography/autofiction. In the meantime, the
researcher has to accept her Eurocentric focus and reflect critically on it, using it as a
heuristic tool. In doing so, and not considering it as ontologically given, we might find
different ways to present our material and develop new perspectives on the variety of
autobiographical self-representation.
With the more systematic approach of volume one and the historical procedure of
volume two in the background, volume three intends to provide closer looks at indi-
vidual autobiographical texts. This is not meant to set up an autobiographical canon
but to demonstrate the richness of the genre and the complexity of its systematic and
historical aspects in individual autobiographical/autofictional texts. The reader may
find here famous and less well-known examples side by side. This is intentional. I
made suggestions to the contributors of the handbook but was open to their alterna-
tive proposals. The authors were asked to write essays on the texts they had chosen
 The Concept of this Handbook XVII

and were not given strict guidelines about how to structure the chapter. The essays are
supposed to give an overview of the state of the research debate but should also be
an enjoyable read and spark the reader’s curiosity about the autobiographical work
being presented.
The different approaches of the handbook’s three volumes provide variable and
multilayered access to the rich and complex autobiographical paradigm. As a matter
of course, the nearly 70 contributors bring in their different individual, cultural, and
disciplinary perceptions of their subject. The objective was thereby not to homoge-
nize the chapters in favor of an overarching concept. This would certainly have been
wrong, since it would create an illusion of coherence. Instead, it is the aim of this
volume to conceptualize the autobiographical genre as multi-perspectival, relational,
and mutable. Thus, the three volumes of this handbook, with more than 150 chapters,
allow many different paths into and through this fascinating genre. Standardization
would also have meant to level out the different academic traditions that have been
prevalent in autobiographical research in different parts of the world. Interestingly,
the term ‘life writing’ that is common in the Anglo-Saxon world does not translate for
example into German. As ‘life writing’ also covers the biographical genre, it is a wider
category than ‘autobiographical writing,’ which is more common on the European
continent. Here, the debate on ‘autofiction’ originating from the French context has
recently played a major role in academic discourse whereas it has only reluctantly
found entry into the English-speaking world. This demonstrates the broad spectrum
of subjects, terms, and concepts within the global academic discourse on the topic
and the handbook tries to do justice to these differences in dealing with the auto-
biographical. And, in order to document the academic Western European origin of
this project in its very specific historical and conceptual conditionality, the handbook
has been given the title Autobiography/Autofiction and not Life Writing. This reflexive,
systematic approach distinguishes the handbook for instance from Margaretta Jolly’s
comprehensive and most impressive Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical
and Biographical Forms (2001). As can easily be seen, different academic traditions
from all over the world enrich the global picture of the autobiographical genre.
In order not to unify more than was necessary, the contributors to the handbook
were free to decide whether they would choose British or American English for their
chapters. For philological reasons, quotations from primary texts are given first in the
original language and then [in square brackets] in an English translation. This pro-
cedure, astonishingly, has caused irritations among contributors, especially among
those writing on non-European subjects and using non-Latin characters. Whereas it
has not been considered problematic for contributors who wrote about autobiograph-
ical texts in European languages, colleagues who are specialists for non-European
literatures were somewhat reluctant to quote in Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic. They
found that using non-Latin characters in the context of Latin script would make the
text uneasy and the reading uncomfortable. This was quite an interesting experience
for me, who, on the one hand, as a philologist, wanted to be as close to the origi-
XVIII Preface

nal text, and, on the other hand, considers plurality and heterogeneity as something
positive and thrilling. Well, compromises were made by using non-European charac-
ters in a somewhat allotted and attenuated form. This may seem a bit unmethodical,
and indeed it is, yet it may be seen as a concession to both the diversity of the world
and heterogeneous academic practices. Published translations in the running text
are marked by double quotes and chapter authors’ own translations are presented in
single quotes.
Such a project as a three-volume handbook has many people to thank: First, I
have to thank Dr. Manuela Gerlof, who initiated the project and always believed in
its success without ever pushing the work process more than was necessary. And I
am happy to say thank you to a wonderful and witty team that, over the years, never
seemed to run out of enthusiasm for the project and patience for the arduous details
of editorial handwork: especially Kerstin Wilhelms, Thomas Kater, Laura Reiling, and
Till Lorenzen, as well as, at the very beginning, Lukas Ricken and, later on, Sarah
Maaß. Claudia Altrock, Peter Klingel, Wolf Wellmann, Elena Göbel, Katharina Grabbe,
Carolina Ihlenfeld, Leona Lucas, and Paula Marie Stevens assisted magnificently
with the indices. Without you all the handbook would not have seen the light of day!
I would like to thank Thomas Bauer and Stephan Tölke, who helped with the Arabic,
as well as Regina Grundmann and Sarah Rürup for their assistance with the Yiddish.
The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Times” at
the University of Münster gave financial support. The Internationales Kolleg Morpho-
mata (Centre for Advanced Studies) at the University of Cologne granted me a research
semester to work on the handbook. I am also grateful to Charlton Payne, who patiently
edited the English of many articles (including this one). Last but not least, I would like
to express my gratitude to the contributors to this handbook, who wrote wonderful
texts and who had to endure the editor’s insistence. The handbook is as much yours
as it is mine!

Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Münster 2018
Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction
Across Disciplines
Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Autobiography is more than just a literary genre – if it is a genre at all. Its manifold
aspects, which have been discussed by literary scholars from the nineteenth century
up to the present day, are closely connected with the core features of literature itself.
For a long time, up until the 1960s, autobiographies had been considered as a sort
of historiographical writing, as texts that are ‘true’ or at least ‘truthful’ reports of a
person’s life. Since these life reports are written by the very person who has lived this
life him or herself, autobiographies were often read as ‘authentic’ descriptions of what
had really happened. This understanding of autobiography goes along with biogra­
phical readings of literary texts in general that are still being practiced, especially by
nonprofessional readers, today. And can we blame them? – Certainly not, as literature
is definitely not written for literary scholars, but for readers. Even if a novel does not
depict the life story of its author it can hardly be denied that it has ‘something’ to do
with the author. This ‘something’, indeed, is hard to grasp, and quite a number of liter­
ary theorists have pondered how to get hold of it. Yet the efforts of the 1960s to do away
with ‘the author’, which resulted in the declaration of his ‘death’ (Barthes 1968 [1977]),
can be regarded as a symbol of the author’s persistence – the more so his return in
the 1990s. Paul de Man convincingly deconstructed the idea that one might be able
to decide which texts should be read as autobiographical and which ones are to be
regarded as merely fictional. He states: “But just as we seem to assert that all texts are
autobiographical, we should say that, by the same token, none of them is or can be”
(1979, 922). This sentence addresses a concept which does not only concern the dis­
cussion of autobiography but which is of utmost importance for literature in general:
‘referentiality’. The ways in which a literary text refers to ‘reality’ represents one of the
most discussed problems in the study of literature and refers back to Aristotle’s notion
of μίμησις [mimesis] and his discussion about imitation and representation.
From the 1960s onwards, the theoretical debate on autobiography has acceler­
ated – and mirrored the general development of literary theory. On the one hand, of
course, the evolution of literary theory affects the debate on autobiography as well.
On the other hand, the theoretical debate on autobiography forms a model of general
issues in literary theory, which become ostensive in the scope of autobiography.
Certainly, the naïve conception that an autobiography may be ‘true’ or ‘truthful’
has already been scrutinized and critically debated in the 1960s. Critics have argued
that nobody can ever thoroughly report his or her life since, on the one side, human
memory is deficient, and, on the other side, human beings are narcissistic, which
means they are not at all neutral and objective when it comes to looking at them­
selves – and others. As early as in the 1960s, literary scholars have highlighted the
fictional dimension inherent in every autobiography. German writer Johann Wolfgang

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-001
2 Introduction

von Goethe (1749–1832) wisely called the first part of his autobiography, which was
published between 1811 and 1833, Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth (1848)].
Goethe regarded his autobiography as the retrospective ‘results’ of his life and, as
Johann Peter Eckermann records, viewed the ‘facts’ reported in Dichtung und Wahrheit
merely as an affirmation of his life’s “höhere[r] Wahrheit” [“higher truth”] (Ecker­
mann 1999, 479 [1998, 406]). Recollection and imagination are the forces behind the
life narrative, and it is ‘fiction’ that purports the ‘truth’ of his life, Goethe wrote in a
famous letter to the Bavarian King Ludwig (Goethe 1993, 209). The use of symbols,
references to the mythological and literary tradition, the freely designed narrative
structure form the poetical character of Goethe’s autobiography – in the service of
the ‘truth’ of his life which he wanted to convey. Accordingly, Roy Pascal named his
often-cited critical work on autobiography, which was published in 1960, Design and
Truth in Autobiography. It is the ‘design’ of the autobiographical text, i. e. the neces­
sity to structure the narration that is responsible for its fictional dimension – and
for its attractive aesthetic value as well. How to tell the truth by fiction? This can be
regarded as the primary concern of the art of autobiography. Self-evidently, there are
as many ways in which ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ are interconnected as there are autobio­
graphical texts. They vary not only across history and different cultural contexts, but
even within the autobiographical production of a single time period and nation. And
it is this richness and variability that form the ongoing fascination of readers and
literary scholars with autobiography.
Yet not only the forms and genres of autobiographical writing have changed
over the centuries, but also the ways in which critics perceive of autobiography have
transformed enormously. And of course, there is a connection between autobiograph­
ical writing and critical reading. Since the 1980s, critics and writers look differently
upon fiction in autobiography. Whereas previously fiction was regarded as unavoid­
able and sometimes therefore as appealing in the art of autobiography, postmodern
writers started to play with and deliberately perform the fictional element, thus giving
birth to the concept of ‘autofiction’ (Grell 2014). The French writer and critic Serge
Doubrovsky, who coined the term when it was used on the back cover of his 1977
book Fils, assembled different aspects under the umbrella term ‘autofiction’. First of
all, it is the linguistic nature of every autobiographical report that causes autofiction
(Gronemann 1999). Furthermore, the insufficiency of human memory causes autofic­
tion. Yet Doubrovsky also thinks of the real-life effects of an autobiographical text as
autofictional. This latter aspect is of utmost importance as it demonstrates that the
autobiographical is not confined to the realm of the written text. The way in which
the autobiographical project influences and even shapes the life of the autobiographer
represents a very specific and important autofictional effect in the world of modern
media (Kreknin 2014). Autofiction transgresses the boundaries between autobiogra­
phy and literature as well as the boundaries between literature and life. This, indeed,
is not new at all. Of course, even former autobiographies, such as Goethe’s Dichtung
und Wahrheit, may be considered as works of autofiction. Needless to say, Goethe and
 Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines 3

his critics did not know the term ‘autofiction’ and therefore they could not address
autobiographical works as autofictional. However, Goethe’s notion of poetry as pro­
moting the ‘truth’ of his life comes fairly close to the current understanding of ‘auto­
fiction’. In questioning genre definitions and the borders of literature, autobiography
and autofiction attest to the relevance of the literary for human life.
Significantly, ‘autofiction’ is not a unified notion. Critics have struggled to define
‘autofiction’ and various suggestions are under discussion. The fact that literary
studies do not provide a consistent explanation of what ‘autofiction’ in fact means
may be considered as a sort of epistemological weakness and an argument to abstain
from the category at all. However, the very fact that ‘autofiction’ has come up at all in
the discussion about the relation of autobiography and fiction demonstrates that there
has been and still is an urgent need for a third term in order to grasp something that
is pressingly at stake in the relation of life and literature.
As it seems to be difficult, if not impossible, definitely to decide whether a text is
autobiographical or not, the French critic Philippe Lejeune, as early as in the 1970s,
has suggested that we think of autobiography as based on the idea of an ‘autobio­
graphical pact’ (Lejeune 1975 [1989]). This means that the text offers to the reader
a ‘pact’ to read it autobiographically. This ‘pact’ is offered either if the name of the
author on the book cover is identical with the narrator’s and the protagonist’s name,
or if the subtitle of the book reads ‘Autobiography’, ‘My Life’, etc.
If this is not the case, i. e. if author, narrator, and protagonist have different names,
or their names are unknown, or the book tags itself as a novel, then this text offers
the novelistic pact, which triggers the reader to read the text as a novel. This means
that ‘autobiography’ is no longer an essentialist category but a dimension, or better:
a constitutive element of the literary communication process. Many chapters of the
handbook refer to Lejeune’s concept, which was quite revolutionary in its time and to
this day fosters the understanding of autobiography as a phenomenon of reception.
Lejeune’s in its time somewhat revolutionary approach has to be considered within
the critical context of the late 1960s/early 1970s, when the ‘theory of reception’ (with
its famous Constance protagonists Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser) first appeared
on the agenda of literary studies. Although it has frequently been an object of criti­
cism, the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’ has been productive also for the
discussion about ‘autofiction’. The comparatist Frank Zipfel (2009) for instance has
proposed that we think of autofiction as an oscillation between the autobiographical
and the novelistic pact. This means that, unsure of how to read the text, as an autobi­
ography or as a novel, the reader oscillates between two attitudes of reception. As can
easily be imagined, literary texts are able to make the best of this ambiguous situation
and playfully gain creative perspectives from it.
As important and fundamental as the fact/fiction debate may be, it is also unpro­
ductive in the long run as it has become clear that there is no absolute distinction
between fact and fiction. Therefore, recent critics, such as Arnaud Schmitt (2010),
have argued to abandon the discussion about autofiction altogether and to concen­
4 Introduction

trate instead on ‘auto-’ or ‘self-narration’ as a form of autobiographical writing which

focuses on the self and how it constructs its identity by relating his or her life. This, of
course, is nothing entirely new, yet it remains relevant and gains novel qualities in the
changing world of globalization and rapid medial transformation.
It is well within the development of literary theory in general that, after the era
of poststructuralist criticism of essentialism and its productive awareness of the
linguistic mediality of meaning, literary studies is again interested in the ‘real-life’
motives and effects of literary production. “Life Is Back!” writes Arnaud Schmitt in
his latest book on autobiography (2017, 2). This, of course, does not mean that one
should forget what critics such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, or Michel Foucault
have taught in the decades before, namely the semiotic, cultural, and discursive
constructedness of the sayable. Instead, these critical insights foster a better under­
standing of ‘experience’ and ‘reality’ as well as their functions in the field of cultural
production. Signification, to sum up, does not contradict ‘the real’, but assists in the
process of making it more intelligible. As Paul John Eakin writes: “[…] I think there is
a legitimate sense in which autobiographies testify to the individual’s experience of
selfhood, that testimony is necessarily mediated by available cultural models of iden­
tity and the discourses in which they are expressed” (1999, 4). However, Eakin warns
with Vincent Descombes against confusing the Cartesian subject, i. e. the subject as
a metaphysical category, with the human person and the autobiographical ‘I’. From
this it follows that literary research has to take into account that the autobiographical
I is an embodied I and to look at the specific ‘experientiality’ of this autobiographical
I (Fludernik 1996, 9). This shift to the embodied ‘I’ has not only initiated the inclusion
of cognitive science approaches to literature but also a reconsideration of its political
and ethical aspects which, obviously, are also relevant in the writing and reading of
autobiographical texts. A striking example of how bodily awareness and contempo­
rary medial form interact in life writing is Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur
[‘Work and Structure’] (2013) which had been published as a blog before it came out as
a book. In this diary-like work, Herrndorf tries to cope with the diagnosis of a terminal
brain tumor. The decaying body becomes a mighty antagonist in Herrndorf’s intense
digitally formatted self-inquiry, which demonstrates that digitalization has not at all
done away with the ‘real’ and the ‘really’ experienced body. It goes without saying
that the publication of the blog, and later on the book, entails far-reaching ethical
considerations.
The new awareness of the ‘real’ and of people’s ‘real-life experience’ (that should
not forget literary studies’ critical knowledge of textuality) is not only due to the rapid
developments in media and especially digital technology but also to the inexorable
process of globalization which threatens to level out diversity and heterogeneity. The
insistent diversity of autobiographical and autofictional production all over the world
is an obvious and weighty counterpoise to these ongoing processes of homogenization
which calls for thorough scholarly research. As Serge Doubrovsky already stated in the
1970s, autobiographies nowadays are not only authored by so-called ‘big names’ such
 Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines 5

as Augustin, Rousseau, or Goethe, but can be and obviously are written by everybody
(Farron 2003). Besides autobiographies by writers, politicians, academics, sports­
people, managers, pop stars, etc., there are autobiographical texts from all sorts of
minority groups, illness narratives, coming-out narratives, narratives of migration and
exile, trauma narratives, diaries and blogs, biographical entries on social media sites,
graphic memoirs, witness narratives, and so on. In their seminal study Reading Auto-
biography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
provide an impressive list of “Sixty Genres of Life Narratives” (2010, 253–286) that
shows the breadth and variety of the autobiographical genre. All these documents of
life writing do not only provide insight into specific historical and cultural contexts
but are themselves part of diverse fields of cultural production. Therefore, autobio­
graphical texts are studied not only by literary scholars but also by historians, sociol­
ogists, philosophers, anthropologists and other academics who look at the genre from
their disciplinary perspectives and who address specific questions to the texts. There
have been ongoing discussions about the relation of reading autobiographies as texts
and/or reading them as sources, i. e. as documents (Depkat and Pyta 2017). Despite
Aristotle’s famous phrase in Περὶ ποιητικῆς [Poetics] (335 BCE) that it is the function of
the historian to relate what has happened whereas the poet relates what may happen
(Aristotle 1995, 1451a), it would be false to maintain that historians, sociologists, etc.
read autobiographies as sources whereas literary scholars investigate their textual
form. It has become quite clear that an awareness of the medial qualities and cultural
constructedness of autobiographical texts is also of utmost importance for scholars
who read autobiographies for their historical, social, or political contents. Just as ‘new
realism’ and (post)structural criticism should not be played off against each other but
brought into a constructive dialogue, the ‘textual approach’ and the ‘documentary
approach’ are equally to be handled and brought into relation with each other in a
case-specific and subtle way. To look at how a text is made does not necessarily mean
to deny the ‘truthfulness’ and the historical value of what is reported.
Interdisciplinary work on autobiography on a larger scale has only started. It is
important for its future productivity that we do not stake disciplinary claims and insist
on theoretical and methodological realms. Fruitful collaboration between the disci­
plines on such a sensitive genre as ‘autobiography’ requires critical knowledge, con­
ceptual reflection, and the ability to shift and modify our perspectives. The interdis­
ciplinary and international Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction aims to prepare a
basis for this kind of interdisciplinary endeavor across (academic) cultures. It enables
the researcher and the student to collect information on manifold aspects of previous
autobiographical research and combine it in a modular way according to her/his indi­
vidual questions and interest. Therefore, volume one of the handbook is structured in
three systematic complexes and, in order to make the information more easily acces­
sible, the entries within these systematic blocks follow an alphabetical order. Thus,
the first volume of the handbook can be used as a sort of dictionary. The first section
(I.1: Theoretical Approaches) traces multiple theoretical approaches to autobiography,
6 Introduction

as for instance, hermeneutics, structuralism, deconstruction, and discourse analysis,

and it informs the reader about the relevance of the autobiographical for different
disciplines other than literary studies, such as history, anthropology, philosophy,
religious studies and others. As it aims at promoting an inter- and transdisciplinary
comprehension of autobiography and autofiction, the handbook provides informa­
tion about the prevalent methodological premises, the approaches, and theoretical
references within the individual disciplines. The second section of volume one (I.2:
Categories) discusses categories which have been applied in the study of autobiog­
raphy/autofiction and which, obviously, are basically connected with the genre, e. g.
‘authenticity’, ‘identity’, ‘subjectivity’, but also ‘gender’, ‘memory’, or ‘trauma’. The
entries connect their focus on the autobiographical/autofictional with general liter­
ary and cultural studies approaches. It goes without saying that the authors of the
individual chapters, as researchers with a specific academic background, may stress
disciplinary preferences; however, they were asked to consider interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary perspectives. The aim of section three (I.3: Autobiographical Forms
and Genres) is to display the multiplicity of autobiographical forms and genres in the
course of history up until the present time. The articles demonstrate the mutability of
the genre and, breaking with Lejeune (1973, 138 [1989, 4]), do not only look at auto­
biographical texts written in prose. They also open up genre boundaries by asking
whether an autobiographical account could also be rendered in lyrical or dramatic,
in musical or pictorial form, or also as film, or even as dance. Looking back in history,
but also observing contemporary developments, the entries in this section put special
emphasis on the media of the autobiographical and its multiple intermedial aspects.
The general question that forms the motif of this handbook project on the whole,
namely the question of what we address whenever we refer to ‘autobiography’, thus
unfolds into a broad spectrum of historical forms, conceptual dimensions, and cul­
tural functions.

Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur.” Manteia (1968): 12–17 [“The Death of the Author.” Image,
Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142–148].
Depkat, Volker, and Wolfram Pyta, eds. Autobiographie zwischen Text und Quelle. Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 2017.
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Johann
Wolfgang Goethe. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. II.12. Ed. Christoph Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Klassiker
Verlag, 1999 [Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann. Ed. J.K. Moorhead. Trans.
John Oxenford. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998].
Farron, Ives. “Die Fallen der Vorstellungskraft. Autofiktion – Ein Begriff und seine Zweideutig-
keit(en).” Trans. Barbara Villiger Heilig. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (31 May 2003). https://www.nzz.
ch/article8VLW2-1.259501 (22 June 2018).
 Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines 7

Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Die letzten Jahre. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche von 1823 bis zu
Goethes Tod. Part 2: Vom Dornburger Aufenthalt 1828 bis zum Tode. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. II.11.
Ed. Horst Fleig. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993.
Grell, Isabelle. L’Autofiction. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014.
Gronemann, Claudia. “‘Autofiction’ oder das Ich in der Signifikantenkette. Zur literarischen Konstitu-
tion des autobiographischen Subjekts bei Serge Doubrovsky.” Poetica 31.1/2 (1999): 237–262.
Kreknin, Innokentij. Poetiken des Selbst. Identität, Autorschaft und Autofiktion am Beispiel von
Rainald Goetz, Joachim Lottmann und Alban Nikolai Herbst. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014.
Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poétique 4 (1973): 137–162 [“The autobiographical
pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30].
de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930.
Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Schmitt, Arnaud. Je réel/Je fictif. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2010.
Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography. Making It Real. New York/London: Rout-
ledge, 2017.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010.
Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität?”
Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen. Ed. Simone Winko, Fotis
Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 284–314.
1 Theoretical Approaches
1.1 Anthropology
Deborah Reed-Danahay

The ethnographic methods of social and cultural anthropology involve direct encoun­
ters between anthropologists and their interlocutors. As anthropologists participate in
daily life among the populations they study, questions about the relationship between
the uniqueness of individual lives and shared aspects of experience and subjectivity
emerge. Anthropologists employ autobiographical methods in their research to elicit
personal narratives among research participants. They also incorporate elements of
their own autobiographies into their ethnographic writing. That anthropology is not
just the study of others but also a reflexive enterprise that includes the life experi­
ences of the anthropologist in relationship to ethnographic fieldwork has become
increasingly accepted in the discipline. Interest in autobiography draws upon older
humanistic traditions of anthropology but has also been influenced by postcolonial­
ism, feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism – approaches that, in spite of
their differences, have made scholars more aware of the social construction of per­
sonhood and gendered ideas of social agency. Forms of writing that connect anthro­
pology and autobiography can be called ‘autoethnography’, when this is defined as
“a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context” (Reed-Danahay
1997, 9), and this term can refer to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobi­
ographical stories that include ethnographic perspectives. This chapter will discuss
three genres of anthropological writing in both historical and contemporary contexts:
1. life writing by anthropologists that focuses on the autobiographical narratives
of their research participants – sometimes called ‘life history’, 2. autobiographical
writing by anthropologists, and 3. literary anthropology that employs methods of
autofiction.

Life History
Life history is a method used in anthropology to elicit the autobiographical narratives
of research participants. Brandes (1982) referred to it as ‘ethnographic autobiography’
because such narratives provide ethnographic information about the social milieu
in which the person lived and about their own life experiences and trajectory from
childhood to adulthood. Life histories can also reveal cultural understandings of self­
hood, including those related to gender and sexuality. Early life histories in American
anthropology concerned the lives of Native Americans, and were connected to debates
about the relationship between cultural creativity and constraint. Examples of this
early work include Radin’s life history of a Winnebago man, Crashing Thunder (1926),
and Landes’ The Ojibwa Woman (1938), a collection of life stories gathered in collab­
oration with Maggie Wilson.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-002
12 1 Theoretical Approaches

Anthropologists increasingly discuss the methods and circumstances in which

life stories are produced, and the relationships between anthropologists and research
participants that develop during their encounters. A classic example of this is Crapan­
zano’s book Tuhami (1980), whose central figure is a Moroccan tile maker with whom
Crapanzano spent many hours in conversation about his life. Crapanzano poses ques­
tions about the nature of fieldwork understanding and intersubjectivity, the problem
of creating a ‘coherent’ story out of the fragments told to him by Tuhami, and the
obligations of anthropologists to their informants. Other well-known examples that
intertwine the autobiographical reflections of the anthropologist in the field with the
life history of a research participant, and which were influenced by feminism and
concerns about giving ‘voice’ to women, include Shostak’s Nisa (1981) and Behar’s
Translated Woman (1983).
The life history method endures in anthropology, but new questions have been
raised in more recent work among nonwestern societies that provides forms of cul­
tural critique (Marcus and Fischer 1999) for western assumptions about autobiogra­
phy. For example, in her research among the Kodi people of Indonesia, Hoskins (1998)
found that because there was no tradition of telling others about one’s life, she could
not elicit life narratives from her interlocutors. Instead, she found that autobiography
could only be conveyed in relationship to discussions about objects used for exchange
and in the domestic sphere. She concludes that “identities and biographies are formed
around objects” (Hoskins 1998, 2) in that society. (See also Oakdale [2005] for an eth­
nographic analysis of ritual and autobiography in the Amazon that shows the embod­
iments of life stories.) A wide range of narrative practices used in biographical and
autobiographical performances among indigenous groups in lowland South America
are explored in an edited collection entitled Fluent Selves (Oakdale and Course 2014).
In a critical look at biographical accounts among Salvadoran migrants to the United
States, Coutin (2011) examines the political deployments of autobiography as stories
of war and violence that circulate internationally and may disrupt neoliberal ideas of
selfhood.

Autobiography
There is a long history of autobiographical writing among anthropologists, but the
degree to which the autobiographical elements of ethnographic writing are fore­
grounded, or remain in the shadows, varies. Although autobiographical writing
among anthropologists emerged as a more prominent genre in beginning in the 1990s,
the impulse to chronicle fieldwork experiences and other aspects of anthropological
lives through memoir goes back at least to Frederica de Laguna’s 1930 text (not pub­
lished until 1977, however) that recounts her 1929 fieldwork in Greenland (de Laguna
1977). Several mid-twentieth-century accounts of fieldwork were written, including
 1.1 Anthropology 13

Marriott (1952), Berreman (1962), Powdermaker (1966), Briggs (1970), Rabinow (1977),
and Dumont (1978).
Personal accounts of fieldwork have frequently been juxtaposed with the classic
ethnographic monograph genre of the mid-twentieth century, in which the goal was
to produce a description and an analysis of the social structure and culture of a par­
ticular group. Its critics portray the ethnographic monograph of previous genera­
tions as adopting a distanced and ‘objective’ approach that conveyed the findings of
research without revealing much about the process of doing fieldwork or its emotional
impact on the anthropologist. A major influence on the turn toward more reflexivity
in anthropological writing was the volume Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 2010
[1986]). Soon after, Tedlock (1991) captured what she called a growing trend toward
“narrative ethnography” in which the anthropologists place themselves within the
frame of discourse. Interest in reflexive writing about fieldwork that blended memoir
and ethnography gained momentum in anthropology during the 1990s, as awareness
of the positionality of the anthropologist increased as part of the so-called ‘postmod­
ern turn’. A landmark text was Okely and Callaway’s edited collection Anthropology
and Autobiography (1992).
Book-length memoirs or autobiographies by anthropologists entail not only
accounts from fieldwork but also stories of career trajectories, travel, and personal
experiences such as illness. Two early classics of this subgenre of anthropologi­
cal autobiography include Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead (1972), and Tristes
Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (2012 [1955]). Zora Neale Hurston, who, like Mead
was a student of Franz Boas and trained as anthropologist (although she is better
known as a novelist), also produced a classic autobiography in Dust Tracks on a
Road (1991 [1942]). More recent books apply anthropological insights to the author’s
own experience and life and have become more revealing of the emotional lives of
the anthropologists. These include Turner (2006), Behar (2013), and Stoller (2009).
Khosravi (2010) chronicles his trajectory from refugee to professor of anthroplogy in
an autoethnography about borders and migration. In a controversial account of his
fieldwork in the Amazon and his professional career as an anthropologist, Napoleon
Chagnon (2013) deploys the autobiographical genre in order to attack anthropology
for moving away from science.
There have also been several themed collections of autobiographical essays, pri­
marily related to fieldwork, produced by anthropologists. Some, like the collection on
the Pacific edited by DeVita (1991) focus on a particular geographic region in which
the anthropologists conducted research. Edited collections have also dealt with issues
of gender and sexuality (e. g. Lewin and Leap 1996; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999).
While the intent of the former, based on geography, is to provide students with a taste
of what fieldwork is like among seemingly ‘exotic’ people, discussion of the foibles
and mistakes made by anthropologists also teach about cross-cultural communica­
tion. Such “fables of fieldwork rapport” (Van Maanen 2011, 73) have a long-standing
tradition in personal narratives of fieldwork. Narratives about gender and sexuality
14 1 Theoretical Approaches

focus on issues of reflexivity about the position of the anthropologist, and seek to
bring more to the surface discussions of the role of gender and sexuality both in our
profession and in fieldwork. In a recent collection on women’s experience, Cattell
and Schweitzer (2006) include the life stories of women who became anthropologists
in midlife. They move from concerns about the ‘voice’ of women studied by anthro­
pologists to one about the hidden voices of a marginalized group of anthropologists.
Anthropologists reflect upon their practices of teaching, research, and social activism
in another edited collection (De Neve and Unnithan-Kumar 2016).

Literary Anthropology and Autofiction

Anthropologists have long written fiction and poetry, although this has often been
viewed as a marginal enterprise in the discipline. The tensions between anthropology
as a science and as a humanistic discipline are evident in the role that literary anthro­
pology has held. The first works of autofiction responded to the bias against autobio­
graphical writing in anthropology that prevailed until the late twentieth century. One
of the earliest examples of autofiction in anthropology is Laura Bohannan’s portrayal
of her fieldwork among the Tiv in Nigeria, Return to Laughter (Bowen 1954). She not
only disguised her fieldwork account by calling it ‘fiction’ but also used a pseudonym
to disguise her identity in order to protect her professional reputation. Another female
anthropologist, Gladys Reichard, is noteworthy, however, because during the 1930s
she wrote in several different genres (using her real name) based on her fieldwork
among Navajo weavers. Among her several books are an autobiographical account of
her fieldwork (1934), a novel about a Navajo family (1939), and a manual about how to
weave using Navajo methods (1936).
Anthropologist Paul Stoller has written autobiographical works, fiction and aut­
ofiction. His second novel, Gallery Bundu: A Story about an African Past (2005) draws
upon his fieldwork in West Africa to create the fictionalized narrative of a middle-aged
former Peace Corps volunteer in Niger who now owns a gallery in New York. Billie Jean
Isbell, an anthropologist who has worked in Peru since the late 1960s, has written a
novel about a fictional female anthropologist “whose voice grew out of my own experi­
ences and those of my women colleagues” (Isbell 2009, ix). In the preface to her book,
she provides an overview of the history of autofiction in anthropology and discusses
her own turn to fiction rather than memoir. She argues that it permits a better under­
standing of the ways in which anthropologists are transformed by fieldwork than can
other genres such as memoir or ethnography. In a recent novel based on his field­
work on an island in the South Pacific, Don Mitchell (2013) writes in the voices of ‘the
natives’ in order to convey the character of the anthropologist (based on himself) from
their perspectives. One of the most well-known anthropologists who writes fiction
is Amitav Ghosh. His book In an Antique Land (1992) blends ethnographic narrative
 1.1 Anthropology 15

based on his doctoral dissertation research in Egypt with a semi-fictional historical

narrative. Fiction has emerged as a growing genre in which to engage autobiography
in anthropological writing.

Works Cited
Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston: Beacon Press,
1993.
Behar, Ruth. Traveling Heavy. A Memoir in Between Journeys. Durham/London: Duke University
Press, 2007.
Berreman, Gerald. Behind Many Masks: Ethnography and Impression Management in a Himalayan
Village. Ithaca: Society for Applied Anthropology, 1962.
Bowen, Elinore Smith [i. e. Laura Bohannan]. Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel. New
York: Harper, 1954.
Brandes, Stanley. “Ethnographic Autobiographies in American Anthropology.” Crisis in Anthropol-
ogy: View from Spring Hill, 1980. Ed. E. Adamson Hoebel, Richard Currier and Susan Kaiser.
New York: Garland Press, 1982.
Briggs, Jean. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1970.
Cattell, Maria G., and Marjorie M. Schweitzer, eds. Women in Anthropology: Autobiographical Narra-
tives and Social History. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2006.
Chagnon, Napoleon. Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanonamo and the
Anthropologists. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
(1986). Berkeley: University of California Press, 25th ed. 2010.
Coutin, Susan Bibler. “Remembering the Nation: Gaps and Reckoning within Biographical Accounts
of Salvadoran Emigrés.” Anthropological Quarterly 84.4 (2011): 809–834.
Crapanzano, Vincent. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
DeVita, Philip R., ed. The Humbled Anthropologist: Tales from the Pacific. Belmont: Wadsworth,
1990.
Dumont, Jean-Paul. The Headman and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Fieldworking Experience
(1978). Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1991.
Hoskins, Janet. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York/
London: Routledge, 1998.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942). New York: Harper Collins,
1991.
Isbell, Billie Jean. Finding Cholita. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Khosravi, Shahram, ‘Ilegal’ Traveler: An Auto-ethnography of Borders. New York: Palgrave, 2010.
de Laguna, Frederica. Voyage to Greenland: A Personal Invitation to Anthropology. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1977.
Landes, Ruth. The Ojibwa Woman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques (1955). Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New
York: Penguin, 2012.
Lewin, Ellen, and William L. Leap, eds. Out in the Field: Reflections on Lesbian and Gay Anthropolo-
gists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
van Maanen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (1988). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2nd ed. 2011.
16 1 Theoretical Approaches

Marcus, George, and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental

Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1999.
Markowitz, Fran, and Michael Ashkenazi, eds. Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist. Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1999.
Marriott, Alice. Greener Fields: Experiences among the American Indians. Garden City: Doubleday,
1952.
Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1972.
Mitchell, Don. A Red Woman Was Crying. Hilo: Saddle Road Press, 2013.
Oakdale, Suzanne. I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian
Community. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Oakdale, Suzanne, and Magnus Course, eds. Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in
Lowland South America. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Okely, Judith, and Helen Callaway, eds. Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1992.
Powdermaker, Hortense. Stranger and Friend: The Ways of an Anthropologist. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1966.
Rabinow, Paul. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Radin, Paul. Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian. New York: D. Appleton,
1926.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah. “Introduction.” Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Ed.
Deborah Reed-Danahay. Oxford: Berg, 1997.
Reichard, Gladys A. Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters. New York: Macmillan,
1934.
Reichard, Gladys A. Dezba: Woman of the Desert. New York: J.J. Augustin Publisher, 1939.
Reichard, Gladys A. Weaving a Navajo Blanket. New York: Dover Publications, 1974 [Orig. Navajo
Shepherd and Weaver. New York: J.J. Augustin Publisher, 1936].
Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. New York: Vantage Books, 1981.
Stoller, Paul. The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009.
Stoller, Paul. Gallery Bundu: The Story of an African Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
Tedlock, Barbara. “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence
of Narrative Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research 47.1 (1991): 69–94.
Turner, Edith. Heart of Lightness: The Life Story of an Anthropologist. New York/Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2006.

Further Reading
Coffey, Amanda. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representations of Identity. London: Sage,
1999.
Collins, Peter, and Anselma Gallinat, eds. The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and
Experience into Ethnography. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010.
Langness, L.L., and Geyla Frank. Lives: An Anthropological Approach. Novatol: Chandler and Sharp,
1981.
McLean, Athena, and Annette Leibing, eds. The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred
Borders between Ethnography and Life. Malden: Blackwell, 2007.
Narayan, Kirin. “Ethnography and Fiction: Where is the Border?” Anthropology and Humanism 24.2
(1999): 134–147.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah. “Autobiography, Intimacy and Ethnography.” Handbook of Ethnography.
 1.1 Anthropology 17

Ed. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lyn H. Lofland. Los
Angeles: Sage, 2007. 407–425.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah, “Autobiography.” Oxford Bibliographies. Ed. John L. Jackson, jr. Oxford
Oxford University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/97/80199766567-0162 .
Watson, Lawrence C., and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke. Interpreting Life Histories: An Anthropolog-
ical Inquiry. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985.
1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience
Hans J. Markowitsch and Angelica Staniloiu

The topic of autobiographical memory has only gained considerable attention in the
neuroscientific research realm in the last three decades. Attempts to engage in a sys­
tematic experimental evaluation of memory for personal experiences can however
be found earlier, such as in the works of Galton and Breukink (Markowitsch 1992, 53,
57). In 1983, Endel Tulving’s book Elements of episodic memory began to pave a novel
path for empirical research in the domain of episodic (autobiographical) memory,
although at the time the construct ‘episodic memory’ was still largely applied to the
context of recalling verbal nouns which had been perceived previously. In order to
provide a framework for empirical testing, Tulving amply discussed and listed the
distinguishing features of ‘episodic’ and ‘semantic’ memories and considered the
former to be traceable back with respect to time and place. The concept of episodic
memory has however evolved over the years. In 2005, Tulving put forth a further dis­
tilled definition of episodic memory (Tulving 2005). The latter became the conjunction
of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness (‘self-awareness’) and the experiencing
self. By emphasizing the relation between episodic memory, self, and a certain type
of phenomenological experience, this definition cemented a new construct: ‘the epi­
sodic-autobiographical memory’. In the experimental field, the new specifications of
episodic memory initiated a major shift in testing paradigms, moving from testing
the memory for laboratory stimuli (e. g. word lists) with a specific embedding in time
and place (Tulving 1972) to investigating the memory for complex events in natural­
istic settings (Risius et al. 2013). The advent of functional neuroimaging techniques
has brought innovative neuroscientific dimensions to memory sciences. Basically,
functional imaging methods have allowed correlating behavioral activity, including
thoughts, with brain activity. Drawing upon data from both research on neural cor­
relates in healthy, non-brain damaged human individuals and results from patients
with brain insults, the partitioning of memory in subsystems and processes under­
went several refinements, leading to a fresh understanding and research avenue in
autobiographical memory.

Memory Subsystems
‘Memory’ has been comprehended and approached very differently in computer
science as opposed to the cultural or social sciences. Only recently attempts to bridge
or integrate views from different disciplines have been witnessed (Markowitsch
2010; Engelen et al. 2013, 289–303). In the neurosciences, clear distinctions between
memory systems and memory processes are made nowadays. Furthermore, memory is
categorized along a time and a content axis, respectively. The universally accepted dis­

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-003
 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 19

Fig. 1: The five long-term memory systems and their assumed brain bases. Procedural memory
is largely motor-based, but includes also sensory and cognitive skills (‘routines’). Priming refers
to a higher likeliness of re-identifying previously perceived stimuli. Perceptual memory allows
distinguishing an object, item, or person on the basis of distinct features. Semantic memory is
context-free and refers to general facts; it encompasses general knowledge of the world. The
episodic-autobiographical memory (EAM) system is context-specific with respect to time and place.
It allows mental time travel. Examples are events such as the last vacation or the dinner of the pre-
vious night. The terms ‘remember’ and ‘know’ describe the distinction between EAM and semantic
memory, as remembering requires conscious recollection embedded in time and space and with
an emotional flavoring, while knowing represents a simple, though conscious, yes/no distinction
without further connotations. Tulving (2005) assumes that during ontogeny (as well as during
phylogeny) memory development starts with procedural memory and ends with episodic-autobio-
graphical memory, a system that he reserves for human beings, while all other systems can be found
in animal species as well.

tinction along the time axis is that between short-term and long-term memory. Short-
term memory is limited to time periods ranging between a number of seconds and
a few minutes, or to the acquisition of four to seven bits of information. Everything
beyond this time span or this number of bits is attributed to long-term memory and
consequently includes life-long memories as well. Along content dimension, memory
is cataloged in five long-term memory systems, which are sketched in Figure 1.
The five long term memory systems are considered to assemble on each other
both from a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic perspective. This implies that phyloge­
netically old animals draw mainly on simple, non-conscious processes of information
transfer, while advanced animals use conscious information processing to a compar­
atively higher degree. The same pattern holds true for human babies as opposed to
older human beings (Markowitsch 2010). From the five long-term memory systems,
the first two (Fig. 1) are regarded to principally rely on unconscious or subconscious
20 1 Theoretical Approaches

(anoëtic) processing of information, the next two on conscious (noëtic) and the last
on self-conscious or self-reflected (autonoëtic) information processing. The first of
the two anoëtic memory systems, procedural memory, is based on mechanical or
motor-related acts (e. g. riding a bike, skiing, playing piano), the second, the priming
system, relies on the repetitive appearance of subconsciously acquired material. An
example are advertisements in radio and TV, where in the first block during a movie
break several advertising spots are presented and then – shortly after – the spots are
repeated in the same or a shortened manner. The idea is that during the presenta­
tion of the first spot the listener or viewer still is with his thoughts with the movie so
that she or he does not consciously process the information. The information has,
however, entered the brain so that it is ‘primed’, with the consequence that, when the
information is basically repeated, it will be processed on a conscious level and may
lead to the buying of the advertised product.
Perceptual memory on the other hand is grounded on the idea that the repeated
or even frequent confrontation with a class of similar stimuli leads to the formation
of a ‘percept’ (e. g. of an apple or a pear, or of a face of a particular individual) so that
this is recognized and categorized irrespective of its current appearance or the angle
from which it is seen, or the luminosity of the environment: An apple always is cate­
gorized as being an apple, irrespective of whether it is green, yellow, or red, or intact
or half eaten. The second of the two noëtic memory systems, semantic memory, refers
to general knowledge (world knowledge, school knowledge), that is to context-free
facts. Autobiographical-semantic knowledge (such as the date of birth, own name)
also belongs to the semantic memory. Lastly, the autonoëtic episodic-autobiograph­
ical memory system is primarily constituted of autobiographical events or episodes,
which not only possess a distinct time and place anchoring (as in Tulving’s first defi­
nition), but also a special kind of phenomenological experience, being grounded by
the conjunction of subjective time, autonoëtic consciousness (‘self-awareness’) and
the experiencing self (Tulving 2005). There has been an ongoing discussion in the
neurosciences, whether it is wise or not to combine the semantic and the episodic-au­
tobiographical memory systems under the heading of ‘declarative memory’. Tulving
and Markowitsch identified and extensively described a number of distinct features,
which offer support for a demarcation between the episodic(-autobiographical) and
the semantic memory system (Markowitsch and Tulving 1998). This separation makes
not only sense from theoretical and experimental standpoints, but also from a clinical
one: Patients with memory disorders tend to solely or predominantly show memory
impairments in the episodic-autobiographical memory domain (e. g. lost access to
their own past, inability to acquire new events for long-term storing). The episod­
ic-autobiographical memory system is regarded as being more susceptible to “disease,
injury and age” (Tulving 2005, 11) in comparison to other memory systems (such as
the knowledge or semantic memory system). This heightened vulnerability of the
episodic memory system in contrast to the knowledge system is also beautifully sug­
gested by a phrase that Bram Stoker wrote in his Dracula (1897). He stated: “Remem­
 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 21

ber my friend that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the
weaker” (Stoker 1897, 119). This phrase furthermore brings the reader to the distinc­
tion between ‘remembering’ and ‘knowing’, which was promoted by Endel Tulving.
‘Remembering’ refers to the episodic-autobiographical memory and experiences of
autonoëtic consciousness, while ‘knowing’ (knowledge) to semantic memory and
noëtic consciousness. Tulving (2002, 2005), when inquiring about which of the two
memory systems were used, would ask: ‘Do you remember this, or do you know this?’
(So-called ‘remember-know paradigm’.)
It should be remarked, that not all autobiographical memories have an episodic
quality. Recalling autobiographic facts such as the own birthday, birthplace or name
obviously does not necessitate traveling mentally back in time. “Semantic representa­
tions of one’s personality traits” and “semantic knowledge of facts about one’s life”
(Gangi and Klein 2010, 2) belong to the so called ‘autobiographical-semantic memory’.
Based on patient data, Klein and Gangi proposed a dissociation within the knowledge
(semantic) memory system between ‘autobiographical-semantic knowledge’ and
‘general knowledge’ (Gangi and Klein 2010). A similar proposal had been made by
Markowitsch and colleagues already in 1996. They wrote:

One therefore might speculate that knowledge about oneself could be another class of semantic
knowledge. However, if such a restricted kind of ‘autobiographical knowledge module’ existed,
it most likely would recruit additional information such as emotional –affective flavor from other
regions (e. g., the amygdala), making it altogether a wider network than those suggested pres­
ently for singular categories of semantic information (Fink et al. 1996, 4281).

Autobiographical Memory in Clinical

Neuropsychology
Patients with persistent and severe memory disorders have offered a great service to
the neurosciences of memory, aiding to shed light on how episodic-autobiographical
memory and other kinds of memory work. They could be categorized into those with
anterograde and those with retrograde amnesia (Ribot 1882) or with a combination
of both (Fig. 2). Patients with anterograde amnesia have certain forms of focal brain
damage that are depicted in Panel 3 of Markowitsch and Staniloiu (2012). Basically,
these are patients with basal forebrain damage, medial temporal lobe, or medial dien­
cephalic damage (Fig. 3). All three groups have major anterograde amnesia in the
episodic-autobiographical domain, but also in anterograde semantic memory. Their
remembrance of the past may be intact.
Hypotheses about the existence of medial temporal lobe amnesia only began
to emerge around the time of the Second World War (Markowitsch 1992). However,
already in 1900 Bechterew described a “Demonstration eines Gehirns mit Zerstörung
der vorderen und inneren Theile der Hirnrinde beider Schläfenlappen” [‘a brain with
22 1 Theoretical Approaches

Fig. 2: Possible consequences of brain injury on old and new memories. Anterograde amnesia refers
to the inability to store new information (usually new biographical events) long-term, while retro-
grade amnesia refers to an inability to retrieve old, already stored memories. Retrograde amnesia
is usually unequally distributed in that way that the information closer to the present or closer to
the significant event represented by the flash symbol, is more easily lost than information from the
remote past. This distribution was first described by Ribot (1882) and is named after him (‘Ribot’s
law’) or termed the ‘law of regression’. It was also Ribot, who attributed three meanings to memory:
“the conservation of certain conditions, their reproduction, and their localization in the past” (Ribot
1882, 10).

Fig. 3: Medial section of the human brain. The darkly colored portions illustrate the areas whose
bilateral damage leads to amnesia.
 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 23

destruction of the anterior and medial parts of the cerebral cortex of both temporal
lobes’] (Bechterew 1900, 990). The bilateral damage of the uncinate and hippocam­
pal gyri was accompanied by an “aussergewöhnliche Gedächtnisschwäche, Erin­
nerungsfälschungen” [‘extra-ordinary anterograde amnesia, and a partial retrograde
amnesia’] (Bechterew 1900, 990).
The most well-known and studied patient with medial temporal lobe amnesia
was patient H. M. (Milner and Scoville 1957; Corkin 2002; Squire 2009). Apparently
H. M. showed a preserved capacity to reflect on his disability when saying “Every
day is alone, whatever enjoyment I’ve had, and whatever sorrow I’ve had” (Corkin
et al. 1968, 217). Otherwise, he was completely amnesic since he had undergone a
surgical intervention for his intractable epilepsy, during which both of his medial tem­
poral lobes – including the hippocampal formation and the amygdalae – had been
removed. H. M.’s procedural and priming memory systems were still intact postopera­
tively, as was his retrograde semantic memory; his anterograde episodic and semantic
memories were however profoundly impaired. H. M. was evaluated repeatedly after
surgery over several decades until his death in 2008. Over the years, his preoperatively
acquired episodic memories deteriorated as well, which led Squire (2009) to consider
it to be impaired as well.
In contrast to medial temporal lobe amnesia, diencephalic amnesia has been
acknowledged and described for a long time (Markowitsch 1992). In 1993, M ­ arkowitsch
and colleagues extensively tested a patient with this condition (Markowitsch et al.
1993). This former medical professor had suffered an ischemic stroke (infarct) in the
medial diencephalon (Fig. 3). As a consequence, he no longer could acquire new infor­
mation for long term storage, although he could remember his past prior to the stroke
incident (retrograde episodic-autobiographical memory [Fig. 2]). His social skills
remained intact, matching what one would have expected to find in an elderly direc­
tor of a clinic (procedural memory [Fig. 1]). His episodic-autobiographical amnesia
as well as his preserved memory abilities in other domains remained unchanged for
more than a decade (i. e. until Markowitsch and colleagues’ investigation of him).
In contrast to patient H. M., this patient with diencephalic amnesia usually showed
unawareness of his memory deficit. This finding supports that the damaged region
is important for self-reflection and self-consciousness (Markowitsch 2013) – an idea
proposed already in 1925 by Dercum (1925).
Essential for “flooding” “the darkness, behind which the function of the hip­
pocampus formation” was still “hidden” (Dercum 1925, 3) have been the cases with
so-called developmental amnesia. These cases were causally linked to relatively selec­
tive damage to hippocampi (resulting in more than 30 % to 40 % bilateral volume
reduction of hippocampi in comparison to healthy participants), occurring perinatally
or in early childhood. Markowitsch and colleagues recently studied a young man with
profound episodic-autobiographical amnesia, due to birth complications leading to
hypoxia and subsequent bilateral damage of a portion of the medial temporal lobe
(the hippocampus) (Borsutzki et al. 2013). As the brain damage of the hippocampi
24 1 Theoretical Approaches

occurred shortly after birth, long before the typical time for the emergence of the
episodic-autobiographical memory system, his episodic-autobiographical memory
system did not achieve proper development and functionality and, as a consequence,
the patient was not able to acquire episodic-autobiographical events. He however
was still able to attend school and to learn facts in a normal way (i. e. he had normal
semantic memory). The only autobiographical episode the patient remembered dated
back to his childhood and had a special emotional charge. He remembered seeing his
father jumping out of the window after a quarrel with his mother. (The window was
situated at the first level of the building and luckily his father survived this experience
unhurt.)
These examples demonstrate that damage to certain bottleneck structures of the
brain leads to severe amnesia, usually restricted to the episodic-autobiographical
domain. However, there are also cases without obvious brain damage (as detected
by conventional structural imaging methods), who still show severe amnesia in the
episodic-autobiographical domain (Markowitsch 2003). These patients might suffer
from dissociative amnesia or a related condition such as a fugue condition (Fink et al.
1997) – where a person loses access to his or her personal past and in addition engages
in suddenly traveling away from his/her usual home or customary environment of
living (Markowitsch and Staniloiu 2013). Over the years, these types of amnesia have
sparked the interest of both health professionals and media and have been named
‘functional’, ‘hysterical’, ‘psychogenic’, ‘dissociative’ or ‘medically unexplained’.
There is accumulating data, which support a psychological stress causation of these
conditions. Not all cases of dissociative amnesia however follow an acute massive
stress. Some occur after a seemingly objective minor stress, but a careful anamnesis
usually elicits a history of recurrent stresses, often with onset in childhood or early
adulthood years (Markowitsch 2000, Table 23.2, 325). Although conventional struc­
tural imaging typically does not yield significant results, functional imaging por­
trays a different picture: these patients have a reduced glucose metabolism in brain
areas assumed to be engaged in memory retrieval (Brand et al. 2009). Their inability
to retrieve their personal past has been termed ‘mnestic block syndrome’. This con­
struct embeds in it the supposed underlying mechanism, circumvents futile mind-
brain debates and instills hope for recovery. It assumes that the mnemonic informa­
tion is still existent in their brain, but it is impossible to consciously access it and
bind it properly with the relevant emotional ‘flavor’ (Markowitsch 2002). In compar­
ison to ‘organic’ forms of amnesia, dissociative amnesia and its variants are often
accompanied by personality loss. Patients frequently present initially with ‘loss’ of
autobiographical-semantic knowledge, but then they quickly re-learn it. Old general
semantic knowledge is often preserved. Furthermore, the patients can still acquire
new information for long term storage both on the semantic and the episodic-auto­
biographical level. The emotional tones of the newly acquired episodes are lower in
comparison to those of normal healthy individuals. This dampened emotional col­
orization may reflect an emotional disengagement with the environment and own
 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 25

condition – a phenomenon already observed in the nineteenth century and named

‘la belle indifference’ (Janet 1894; Breuer and Freud 1895; Markowitsch and Reinhold
2009).

Functional Imaging and Autobiographical Memory

The increased recognition and attractiveness of functional imaging permeated also
the research on autobiographical memory, leading to a number of studies that have
tried to unravel the brain correlates of episodic-autobiographical memory or differ­
ent components of it (such as mental time traveling or autonoëtic awareness) and
distinguish at the neural level between true autobiographical events and false or
fictitious ones. Due to space constraints, only a few relevant studies will be high­
lighted herein. Markowitsch and colleagues were among the first of the research
working groups to trace the neural correlates of episodic-autobiographical memory
retrieval in healthy human participants using positron emission tomography. They
discovered that a network of regions in the temporo-frontal cortex is activated when
accessing past episodes (Fink et al. 1996). Our results were in agreement with results
from brain-damaged patients who had their principal lesions in exactly the same
regional combination (Knight et al. 1997), and, later they received confirmation from
other research groups. For example, LaBar and Cabeza stated in 2006: “[s]tudies of
retrograde amnesia support Markowitsch’s proposal that retrieval of remote personal
memories involves interactions between the inferior PFC (prefrontal cortex) and its
connections with the anteromedial temporal lobe that course through the uncinate
fasciculus” (Cabeza and St. Jacques 2007, 59). In another avant-garde study with pos­
itron emission tomography, which was carried out in healthy participants, Marko-
witsch and colleagues compared the retrieval of true autobiographical episodes with
the retrieval of fictitious ‘episodes’. They determined a (right-hemispheric) activation of
the amygdala only during the recall of personal – authentic – events, while the recall
of fictitious (fabricated) resulted in quite different brain activations, mainly in the
posterior cortex, including the precuneus. Named ‘the mind’s eye’, the precuneus has
been attributed functions in mentally imagining events or ideas (Heiss et al. 2000).
Another road of research that was largely opened by the advent of functional neuro­
imaging is the one of so-called ‘false memory syndrome’ (‘pseudoreminiscences’),
although speculations about neural underpinnings of ‘pseudoreminiscences’ or ‘false
memories’ can already be found in the works of Kraepelin and Korsakoff (Markowitsch
1992). The observation that information may be retrieved differently than how it was
encoded can be traced back to the process of perception. It is know from numerous
perceptual illusions (e. g. Markowitsch 2010, Fig. 2, 35) that sensory systems inter­
pret information subjectively and not physically correct. This implies that portions
of the perceived information are inadequately encoded and stored, and will conse­
26 1 Theoretical Approaches

quently also be inadequately retrieved. Furthermore, the encoding-specificity princi­

ple (Thompson and Tulving 1973) that implies that memory is faithfully reconstructed
when the encoding conditions highly match the conditions present at retrieval, may
offer also an explanatory avenue for the occurrence of blockades in retrieval and/or
memory distortions. Markowitsch and colleagues carried out a study during which
healthy participants watched a short unemotional movie. Thereafter they underwent
a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation during which they were pre­
sented with scenes that were present in the movie, scenes that were similar to those
presented in the movie or scenes that were completely new. In a forced choice format,
the participants had to decide if the respective scene had been in the movie or not.
On the behavioral level, participants made many errors (more than 44 % of answers
were incorrect) (Kühnel et al. 2008). At the brain level, the behavioral differences got
translated in a neural dissociation. Correct answering (true identifications) resulted
in activations in portions of the medial prefrontal cortex (Kühnel et al. 2008), an area
that was ascribed functions in self-referential processing. False answering led to pos­
terior cortical activations (in the precuneus and visual association cortex), which were
suggestive of the following operations: generation and mental inspection and match­
ing of alternative representations in the presence of uncertainty and use of conscious
imagery to enable retrieval (Kühnel et al. 2008).

Summing Up
Neuroscience has provided numerous plentiful insights into relations between brain
alterations and changes in episodic-autobiographical memory. It has sharpened our
views on defining episodic-autobiographical memory and distinguishing it from other
memory systems. Both results from functional brain imaging and from brain damaged
patients have revealed that the memory systems have distinct bases in the brain and
that also the processes of information encoding, storage and retrieval can be sepa­
rated on the brain level. Phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic studies revealed that
there is a sequence in the development of memory systems which begins on the left
of Figure 1 with the two anoëtic memory systems; these are found in invertebrates
and simple vertebrates as well as in human babies. Thereafter the two noëtic systems
develop, which are found in mammals and many birds and in children below the
age of three to four years. The episodic-autobiographical memory system lastly is –
according to Tulving (2005, 2002) – reserved for healthy humans after the age of four
years. While it emerges the latest, the episodic-autobiographical memory system is
usually the first memory system that deteriorates, due to ageing or disease. In con­
trast to it, the semantic memory system (including the autobiographical-semantic
system) shows more resilience. Therefore patients who suffer episodic-autobiograph­
ical memory impairments, but continue to have an intact autobiographical-semantic
 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 27

memory might still be able to maintain some aspects of personal identity (Conway et
al. 2009). These findings argue against proposals made by animal researchers to step
out of the Tulving’s model and speak instead for further refinements within the same
framework. How are the commonalities and differences of the semantic and episodic
components of autobiographical memory translated at the brain level? How do we
break down at the neural level the different components of episodic-autobiographical
memory: self, emotion, autonoëtic awareness, mental time traveling? How do memo­
ries of the personal past shape our memories of the future behaviorally and the brain
level (Ingvar 1985)? Neuroimaging methods coupled with rigorous testing paradigms
could unlock new venues for pursuing these questions in the future.

Works Cited
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und inneren Theile der Hirnrinde beider Schläfenlappen.” Neurologisches Centralblatt 19
(1900): 990–991.
Borsutzky, Sabine, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Angelica Staniloiu, and Friedrich Woermann. “Social
cognition in a case of amnesia with neurodevelopmental mechanisms.” Frontiers in Cognition 4
(2013): Art. 342, 1–28.
Brand, Matthias, Carsten Eggers, Nadine Reinhold, Esther Fujiwara, Josef Kessler, Wolf-Dieter Heiss,
and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Functional brain imaging in fourteen patients with dissociative
amnesia reveals right inferolateral prefrontal hypometabolism.” Psychiatry Research: Neuro­
imaging Section 174 (2009): 32–39.
Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studien über Hysterie. Wien: Deuticke, 1895.
Cabeza, Roberto, and Peggy St Jacques. “Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory.”
Trends in Neurosciences 11.5 (2007): 219–227.
Conway, Martin A., Chris J. Moulin, and Clare J. Rathbone. “Autobiographical memory and amnesia:
using conceptual knowledge to ground the self.” Neurocase 15.5 (2009): 405–418.
Corkin, Suzanne, Brenda Milner, and Hans-Lukas Teuber. “Further analysis of the hippocampal
amnesic syndrome: Fourteen year follow-up study of H. M.” Neuropsychologia 6 (1968):
215–234.
Corkin, Suzanne. “What’s new with the amnesic patient H. M.?” Neuroscience 3 (2002): 153–160.
Dercum, Francis X. “The thalamus in the physiology and pathology of the mind.” AMA Archives of
Neurology and Psychiatry 14 (1925): 289–302.
Engelen, Eva-Maria, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Marko Tscherepanow, and Harald Welzer.
“Gedächtnis und Erinnerung.” Handbuch Kognitionswissenschaften. Ed. Achim Stephan and
Stefan Walter. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013. 289–303.
Fink, Gereon R., Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Mechthild Reinkemeier, Thomas Bruckbauer, Josef
Kessler, and Wolf-Dieter Heiss. “Cerebral representation of one’s own past: neural networks
involved in autobiographical memory.” Journal of Neuroscience 16 (1996): 4275–4282.
Gangi, Cynthia E., and Stanley B. Klein. “The multiplicity of self: neuropsychological evidence and
its implications for the self as a construct in psychological research.” Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 1191 (2010): 1–15.
Grünthal, Ernst. “Über das klinische Bild nach umschriebenem beiderseitigem Ausfall der Ammons­
hornrinde. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Funktion des Ammonshorns.” Monatsschrift für
­Psychiatrie und Neurologie 113 (1947): 1–16.
28 1 Theoretical Approaches

Ingvar, David H. “Memory of the future: an essay on the temporal organization of conscious aware-
ness.” Human Neurobiology 4.3 (1985): 127–136.
Janet, Pierre. État mental des hystériques. Paris: Rueff, 1894.
Kroll, Neal, Robert Knight, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, and Detlev Y. von Cramon. “Retrieval of old
memories – the temporo-frontal hypothesis.” Brain 120 (1997): 1377–1399.
Kühnel, Sina, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Markus Mertens, and Friedrich G. Woermann. “Involve-
ment of the orbitofrontal cortex during correct and false recognitions of visual stimuli. Impli-
cations for eyewitness decisions on an fMRI study using a film paradigm.” Brain Imaging and
Behavior 2 (2008): 163–176.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. Intellectual functions and the brain. Toronto: Hogrefe & Huber, 1992.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Repressed memories.” Memory, consciousness, and the brain: The
Tallinn conference. Ed. Endel Tulving. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000. 319–330.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Functional retrograde amnesia – mnestic block syndrome.” Cortex 38
(2002): 651–654.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Psychogenic amnesia.” NeuroImage 20 (2003): 132–138.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Memory and self – neuroscientific landscapes”. ISRN Neuroscience
(2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/176027 (11 July 2018).
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, Uwe Schuri, and Detlev Y. von Cramon. “Mnestic performance profile of
a bilateral diencephalic infarct patient with preserved intelligence and severe amnesic distur-
bances.” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 15 (1993): 627–652.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, Gereon R. Fink, Angelika Thöne, Josef Kessler, and Wolf-Dieter Heiss.
“Persistent psychogenic amnesia with a PET-proven organic basis.” Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
2 (1997): 135–158.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Endel Tulving. “Episodic and declarative memory: Role of the hip-
pocampus.” Hippocampus 8 (1998): 198–204.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, Alexander Thiel, Mechthild Reinkemeier, Josef Kessler, Adem Koyuncu,
and Wolf-Dieter Heiss. “Right amygdalar and temporofrontal activation during autobiographic,
but not during fictitious memory retrieval.” Behavioural Neurology 12 (2000): 181–190.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Nadine Reinhold. “Retrograde episodic memory and emotion:
a perspective from patients with dissociative amnesia.” Neuropsychologia 47 (2009):
2197–2206.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Sabine Bosutzky. “Entwicklung und Störungen des menschlichen
Bewusstseins aus neurowissenschaftlicher Sicht.” Bewusstsein und Ich. Ed. Freie Akademie.
Neu-Isenburg: Lenz Verlag, 2010. 19–40.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “Amnesic disorders.” Lancet 380.9851 (2012):
1429–1440.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “The impairment of recollection in functional
amnesic states.” Cortex 49.6 (2013): 1494–1510.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Harald Welzer. The development of autobiographical memory.
Hove: Psychology Press, 2010.
Milner, Brenda, and William B. Scoville. “Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal
lesions.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20 (1957): 11–21.
Ribot, Theodule. Diseases of memory. New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1882.
Risius, Uda-Mareike, Angelica Staniloiu, Martina Piefke, Stefan Maderwald, Frank P. Schulte,
­Matthias Brand, and Hans-Joachim Markowitsch. “Retrieval, monitoring, and control processes:
a 7 tesla FMRI approach to memory accuracy.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7 (2013):
1–21.
Squire, Larry R. “The legacy of patient H. M. for neuroscience.” Neuron 61 (2009): 6–9.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Archibald Constable & Comp, 1897.
 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 29

Thompson, Donald M., and Endel Tulving. “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic
memory.” Psychological Review 80.5 (1973): 352–373.
Tulving, Endel. “Episodic memory and autonoesis: uniquely human?” The missing link in cognition:
evolution of self-knowing consciousness. Ed. Janet Metcalfe and Herbert S. Terrace. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005. 3–56.
Tulving, Endel. Elements of episodic memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Tulving, Endel. “Episodic and semantic memory”. Organization of memory. Ed. Donaldson Wayne
and Endel Tulving. New York: Academic Press, 1972. 381–403.
Tulving, Endel. “Episodic memory: From mind to brain.” Annual Reviews of Psychology 53 (2002):
1–25.

Further Reading
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Harald Welzer. The development of autobiographical memory.
Hove: Psychology Press, 2010.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “Functional (dissociative) retrograde
amnesia.” Handbook of clinical neurology Vol. CXXIX: Functional neurological disorders.
Eds. Mark M. Hallett, Jon Stone and Alan Carson. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2016. 419–445.
Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “History of memory.” Oxford handbook of the
history of clinical neuropsychology. Eds. William Barr and Linus A. Bielauskas. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018.
Nilsson, Lars-Göran, and Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, eds. Cognitive neuroscience of
memory. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1999.
Röttger-Rössler, Birgit, and Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, eds. Emotions as biocultural processes. New
York: Springer, 2008.
Staniloiu, Angelica, and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Dissociative amnesia.” Lancet Psychiatry 1
(2014): 226–241.
Staniloiu, Angelica, and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Amnesia, psychogenic.” International
encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences Vol. 1. Ed. James D. Wright Oxford: Elsevier
Science, 2nd ed. 2015. 651–658.
30 1 Theoretical Approaches

1.3 Cultural Studies

Michaela Holdenried

In the last fifty years in the Anglo-American sphere, Cultural Studies have obtained
validity as a framework for a variety of research approaches or have been critically
challenged, whereas in Germany ‘Kulturwissenschaften’, as a platform for the cul­
tural turn in the humanities, have become anchored only since the 1990s. The cur­
rents in German academe opposing the main stream in ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are
apparent, and in comparison to the critical attacks on Cultural Studies, play them­
selves out merely as discussions about problem solving strategies in the humanities.
From the beginning they were closely related to the process of re-organizing the uni­
versity, whereas Cultural Studies were seen more as answers to social transgression
and less as an exclusively academic movement (Lindner 2000). Their social origins
were a crisis of English society in the form of youth rebellion, the challenging of ‘high
culture’ of an elite and the appreciation in value of sub- and popular cultural milieus.
The imaginably wider concept of culture as a whole way of life was aimed at the co-
equality of cultural products from all walks of life. Concrete expressions and practices
of everyday life came into analytical focus. Mass culture and media usage played a
further important role. Methodically, in privileging participant observation – Gross­
berg calling it “a sense of intervention and even […] policy” (Grossberg 1999, 29) –,
concepts were sourced from ethnology (or anthropology in American terminology). In
addition, cultural semiotics displaced established hermeneutic practices. Since their
foundation, Cultural Studies were exposed to attacks (see the Alan Sokal scandal of
faking the style of writing in Cultural Studies), not only in respect of an assumed
methodical vagueness, but in particular with regard to the political interventionism
as a critique of power, as Grossberg observes.
For ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ Aleida Assmann highlights the effective change not
only in respect of theoretical requirements, but also in respect of an enormous boost
in prestige for the humanities: “As we move from Geisteswissenschaften to Kultur­
wissenschaften, all the old problems seem suddenly to have disappeared. The per­
petual crisis is replaced by a new and vigorous self-image of Kulturwissenschaften”
(Assmann 1999, 89).
Both ‘Cultural Studies’ and ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are central concepts and cate­
gories of orientation for a variety of developments, which have only vaguely (and often
critically) been described by the term ‘culturalism’ – meaning a complete revision of
culture connected to ‘high culture’ in a humanistic sense, and which nowadays claims
validity in its plural form of ‘cultures’. Culture consequently contains the entirety of
human practices in everyday life as well as in science and art. Cultural products are
results of symbolic allocations of meaning, of values and achievements affecting
society partially or in its entirety (sub-cultures, specific cultural milieus). In defining
culture, attached more narrowly to a philological context, as “einen symbolischen

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-004
 1.3 Cultural Studies 31

oder textuellen Zusammenhang […], ein Textuniversum, in welchem sich einzelne

kulturelle Momente, als Texte, immer nur durch ihre Kontexte, bzw. eine Fülle von
Kontexten erschließen” [‘a symbolic or textual connectedness […], a textual universe
where individual cultural moments, as texts, reveal more and more context through
their contexts’] (Böhme and Scherpe 1996, 15), widening this concept of culture explic­
itly invites re-contextualizations. In recent years cultural semiotics not only became a
fruitful approach for the regeneration of philological disciplines, but turned out to be
the decisive keyword for a forced beginning of self-reflection in respect of the political
culture of the West and its traditions.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), founded in 1964 in Birming­
ham, anchored Cultural Studies institutionally and introduced in Great Britain and
the USA a revision of the concept of culture, which in turn addressed concrete prac­
tices and forms of living. Cultural Studies on the other hand were from the beginning
understood as answers to social transgression and less so as an exclusively academic
movement (Lindner 2000). In going back to William Labov, however, they introduced
aspects of difference depriving hierarchical valuations of their foundation.
In distancing itself from the hermetic reading practices of close reading (in New
Criticism) cultural criticism or materialism (Raymond Williams) implemented an
interpretive turn. Cultural semiotics, exceeding the classical canon, became the most
important instrument for cultural interpretations. The concept of culture was kept
very wide and was closely connected to an investigation of those power structures,
which control the everyday life of the individual (as consumer). Cultural Studies have
always been addressing the possibilities of resistance and subversion, as Michel de
Certeau (1984), for instance, stresses in The Practice of Everyday Life. Cultural Studies
are methodically not only inter- but actually anti-disciplinarily positioned, as promi­
nent representatives such as Grossberg and others have conceded. As an interpret­ive
approach – in respect of texts as well as non-discursive reality – constructivism is
favoured and as such the idea of the constructedness of all culture. As „Differenzwis­
senschaften“ [‘sciences of difference’], to use Lindner’s (2000, 94) terminological sug­
gestion, Cultural Studies are theoretically and methodologically close to poststructur­
alism, conjuncturalism, discourse theory and postmodernism. In the guise of various
theoretical models such as culture as text, culture as communication, culture as differ­
ence, culture in socio-political spaces, culture in institutions and ‘discourse and every­
day life’, Cultural Studies are attempting to respond to the challenges and problems of
globalization and modernization (Grossberg 1999). Cultural Studies therefore operate
globally as well as locally. Next to constructivism as a leading paradigm it is contex­
tualism, detailed by Grossberg (1999) as a further significant paradigm for cultural
analysis. Contextualism can be understood as battle for meaning, which is fought with
varying alliances. Representatives of Cultural Studies are convinced that we are wit­
nessing an encompassing transformation process of global capitalism, which will not
only change everyday life but will effect identity politics – in which culture will play
an important role as an integrative as much as a resistant element of globalization.
32 1 Theoretical Approaches

A closeness to anthropology was given from the beginning, but became fruitful
only when ethnography itself became aware of its share in constructivism. In a sort
of co-emergence cultural anthropology came into being, making further trend-setting
forays since opening its methodological horizon to transfer concepts of understanding
the foreign into an empathy independent decoding system. The disciplinary conver­
gence is very critically looked upon by anthropology as a discipline, characterized by
Appadurai as a “war of the disciplines“ (Lindner 2000, 85).
Cultural Studies largely limiting themselves to their own ‘participatingly observed’
society, is no longer reassuring for ethnology’s claim, since prominent representa­
tives of the discipline are themselves turning to researching their own culture (see,
for instance, Marc Augé in France who with innovative methods combines field obser­
vation and autofiction to form an ethnographical amalgam, see his Journal d’un SDF
[No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction (2011)]). It has repeatedly been pointed out that identity
politics of Cultural Studies as context of the autobiographical are already identified
in their founding acts: the ‘sociological autobiography’ as a genre is believed to have
been established by the ‘culturalists’ Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall (Genin 2010, 12).
In Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), one of the founding texts – an autobiographi­
cal reflexive text about the path from worker’s to academic milieu –, it can be seen how
for a group of the scholarship boys it became the generation theme (Lindner 2000,
27, with reference to Mannheim’s generation theory). We are dealing here with para­
digmatic autobiographies with topics that were virulent in the society at large: lived
experience, self improvement, but also the ‘in-between’ of the scientist coming from
a foreign cultural context like Stuart Hall who hailed from the Caribbean. Members
of the scholarboy generation experienced popular vs. high-brow culture in their own
biography at the time as a gap as well as an element connecting them to like-minded
people within the peer group. There is a clear homology between research topic and
individual.
Cultural Studies, in their autobiographical founding documents, present them­
selves as an empirical science which generically finds expression in autobiography.
This license for self-thematization (Lindner 2000, 87) marks the transition to the aca­
demic legitimization of the autobiographical and at times the nobilitation of personal
experience as research field. The closeness to theoretical approaches such as Postco­
lonial Studies contains in this field of empirical knowledge also an autobiographical
element.
‘Kulturwissenschaften’ in the German context represent a meta level of the
humanities’ self-reflection and re-organization, thereby regulating the confines of a
discipline (Fauser 2003, 9) with inter- and transdisciplinary claim, multiperspectival
theoretical, in particular text- and media-analytical grasp. With this novel yet based
on the traditional German paradigm, the humanities and social sciences have tried
to newly orientate themselves since the 1990s after a long crisis period of legitimacy
challenges. The so-called Denkschrift [‘memorandum’] of Wolfgang Frühwald (1991),
with contributions by Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Robert Jauß, Jürgen Mittelstraß, in
 1.3 Cultural Studies 33

respect of positioning the humanities in the new context of globalization, intermedial

interconnectedness and international migrations, made for good publicity. Frühwald
and his combatants postulated an ‘orientation form’ of those things their disciplines
were dealing with, and since those were at all times connected to a ‘cultural form’,
per analogiam the humanities and social sciences had to be afforded an orientation
form. Orientational knowledge was of central importance because views of the world
and interpretive approaches had become more and more particular, the arbitrariness
of a plurality of methods and the lack of a ‘meta-science’ had led to a disconcerting
‘anything goes’.
Culture became the leading paradigm, the umbrella term for knowledge, research
and teaching fields, fragmented into particularisms. Culture, Mittelstraß defined, was
“der Inbegriff aller menschlichen Arbeit und Lebensformen” [‘essentially all human
labour and forms of living’] (Frühwald et al. 1991, 40), constituting a ‘cultural entity’ –
distancing it from technology, economy and politics – and the non-circumventable
point of reference of all activities in the humanities. The memorandum explicitly
demanded a ‘historical anthropology’ as well as “eine Hermeneutik interkultureller
Kommunikation” [‘a hermeneutics of intercultural communication’] (Frühwald et al.
1991, 71). Both thereby were accorded the status of guidelines, which were meant to
organize the necessary paradigm shift under the governing competence of ‘humani­
ties as cultural sciences’. It is historically interesting to note that these debates at the
end of the last century refer back to analogous debates of a century before, where
Wilhelm Dilthey (in the tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher) claimed for hermeneu­
tics, as instrument of the humanities, a similar guideline principle when the booming
natural sciences first had decidedly made their claims for an overall scientific
priority.
Aleida Assmann, however, pointed out that hermeneutics “as a unified methodol­
ogy for the humanities” further widened “the gulf between the Geisteswissenschaften
and the Naturwissenschaften” (Assmann 1999, 87). Yet, ‘self-knowledge’ had always,
analogous to Cultural Studies, been part of the hermeneutical tradition as the foun­
ding acts of self-reflective humanities and could therefore be accessed in the 1990s
(as Alois Wierlacher in his inauguration of intercultural German Studies earlier had
explicitly revived it).
The reorganization of the research landscape, subsequent to the memorandum,
finally turned German Studies away from pure textual science as practiced after the
restart of research in German studies in the 1950s by Emil Staiger and others, but then
very soon through the installation of the paradigm ‘society’ became riddled with holes
and dissolved. With the programmatic claim to understand ‘culture as text’ Doris
Bachmann-Medick in the 1990s, brought this change, beginning decades earlier, to a
point and pleaded, through the reception of the theoretical discussion around James
Clifford in America, for an extension of the concept of culture. The category ‘alter­
ity’ – as the foreign, the other, an inclusion in this country (Germany) as well with a
long tradition, contemplating the romantic philosophy and the ‘otherness of reason’
34 1 Theoretical Approaches

the ‘dark side of rationality’ – was referred to the relationship to foreign cultures and
made its touchstone.

Differences and Convergences

Just like Cultural Studies, ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ as well were subjected to critical
challenges: the cultural turn seemed to open the door for methodological arbitrari­
ness. Their proponents, however, saw the pluralism of methods and replacing ‘spirit’
with the paradigm ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ as an advantage in approaching not only
texts in a more flexible manner. Canon revisions were some of the results of a plu­
ralistic understanding of culture/s. By way of contrapuntal reading (Edward Said),
inspired by Postcolonial Studies or more generally, re-reading, texts were newly con­
textualized as, for example, the postcolonial re-readings of bourgeois realism show.
Further results are the extension of research subjects into society as a whole, for
which ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ claim expert status insofar as they “claim to possess
a special competence in symbolic realities” (Assmann 1999, 91). In this turn towards
everyday culture – which the Tübingen Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (empirical cul­
tural science) under Hermann Bausinger had already institutionally entrenched in the
1980s – a point of contact can be seen with Cultural Studies; others are: the revalu­
ation of products of pop culture as well as the overall turn to (mass) media. Next to
Clifford Geertz and the Writing Culture-theoreticians (James Clifford et al.), Stephen
Greenblatt’s New Historicism had an influence, where the privileging of high culture
too was abolished in favour of everyday life documents.
A more detailed analysis of both cultural scientific directions could probably show
that mutual influences are stronger than commonly noted (via the exiling of the Aby
Warburg-school and library and its renaissance in the German ‘Kulturwissenschaf­
ten’ since the 1980s, critical theory, Walter Benjamin and his reception for instance
through Homi K. Bhaba and the references to cultural semiotics among others). Such
interdependencies would have to be considered, in distinction from emphasizing the
differences as Aleida Assmann does in respect of the ‘apolitical stance’ of ‘Kulturwis­
senschaften’:

While American and British cultural studies redefine culture in such a way as ‘to provide ways
of thinking, strategies for survival and resources for the marginalized’ German Kulturwissen­
schaften seem to do the very opposite […]. Their insistence on signs and symbols, media and
memory constitute an approach to a theory of culture that cannot immediately serve as a matrix
for political action (Assmann 1999, 91).
 1.3 Cultural Studies 35

Autobiography/Autofiction
Shared principles such as the concept of the constructedness of culture/s and the
contextualism have in various fields, Gender Studies to name but one, generated par­
tially fundamental revisions. Gender, following the work of Judith Butler (and Thomas
Lacqueur) is no longer seen as a biological denotation but a cultural construct. Auto­
biographical experience literature was here on a sub-structural level, as effective as
in respect of revising the idea of a so to speak naturalized gender relationship (see the
biographies of women scholars in the 18th century, like Friderika Baldinger et al.).
Identity politics play also a role in the field of literary anthropology, broadened by a
cultural science approach: Helmut Pfotenhauer (1987) in this regard had before the
cultural turn already provided decisive impulses for a re-reading of historical autobi­
ography. The autobiography, for a long time already, is deemed to be the anthropolog­
ical project par excellence of the modern era, where subjectivity is tested as a project.
The non-succeeding, irrational, mentally foreign, as part of a teleological concept
of holism have, in Cultural Studies/‘Kulturwissenschaften’ through research directions
such as literary anthropology, the phenomenological xenology according to Bernhard
Waldenfels (‘topography of the foreign’), but also through invididual studies such as
Kristeva’s on interdependence and concept of self, as a matter of course, become part
of the epistemological inventory.
Essentialist models of identity have, as a result of poststructuralist discourse ana­
lysis, been abandoned. The basic assumption that the subject is constituted through
language is scientific consensus since Lacan and Foucault. Even more so since the
neurosciences are reinforcing the constructivist hypothesis formation.
Central to ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are key concepts which are directly connected to
theoretical issues of autobiography. The field of memory research, which Aleida and
Jan Assmann initiated in an interdisciplinary way, is an essential part. The authorita­
tive concepts of ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ remembering are not theoretically gen­
erated products but instead, incorporation and development of in particular Maurice
Halbwachs’ theory in respect of collective memory. There is surprisingly little research
on function and form of literary remembering, despite the seemingly apparent
relationship between remembering and autobiographical narration. The increase in
memory research has only recently taken autobiography into account. For a long time
it had been a special research subject, where traditions of remembering techniques,
metaphorical concepts and models and their adaptation in respect of media develop­
ments and integrating recent knowledge of brain research/neurophysiology ranked
higher. While autobiographical theory had maintained that stylization was one of the
essential elements of generating/narrating the self, now ‘constructivity’ became the
main attribute: supposing that identity is constructed mainly through remembering,
itself a construction unable to procure an ‘original’, then that would support the sup­
positions of systems theory and constructivism in respect of identity as ‘autopoiesis’
and ‘self-generation’ (Niklas Luhmann). Memory research in ‘Kulturwissenschaf­
36 1 Theoretical Approaches

ten’ replaced the classical storage imagery with time oriented concepts of memory.
‘Storage’ as locatable container of memory is replaced by fleeting models such as for
instance ‘trace’. Media influences on remembering are also leading to a replacement
of storage models by technoid analogies. Even the constructivist approach, however,
admits the activation of a permanent structure in complex cognitive connections
(Schmidt 1993, 381) in remembering. In this perspective, remembering can be under­
stood as neuronal connectivity or as digital wiring. The hypothetical character is
shared by all models (in replacing Plato’s wax tablet or the depot with the respective
modern medial equivalent).
Changed concepts of memory functions and ways of remembering have created
new literary remembering techniques, as they are, for instance, already recognizable
in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976) [Patterns of Childhood] or in Georges-Arthur
Goldschmidt’s continuous autobiographical project (up to La traversée des fleuves
[1999]). As a result, aspects of construction come to the fore in autobiographical
writing and less the mnemotechnically oriented approach. What remembering uncov­
ers (or thus constructs) is never ‘authentic’ in the sense of recovering or reproducing
past memories (as residues of facts of life, ‘real life’). It can only in (pathological)
borderline cases be exposed as ‘false memory’ as in the case of Binjamin Wilkomir­
ski’s ‘memories’ (Wilkomirski had in his ‘autobiography’ claimed to be a holocaust
survivor. His exposure sparked a comprehensive false-memory-debate). Disregarding
such presumptions of someone else’s curriculum vitae (though by the way very much
part of the history of autobiography) it is, however, the rule that the narrated memory
sequences are selected according to their – actual or imagined – significance for the
individual genesis. Insofar, in congruence with recent theoretical approaches (which
resonate with the autobiographical praxis) autobiographical studies are still able to
connect memorial segments to form a ‘meaningful’ structure, no matter how ‘con­
structive’ it may be.
In the transition from individual remembering to autobiographical writing as a
family history (see the boom in autobiographical family novels since 2005), in pro­
jects like Walter Kempowski’s Echolot [‘Echo Sounding’] (1993), the convergences of
‘social practice’ in ‘Cultural Studies’ and ‘cultural memory’ in ‘Kulturwissenschaften’
are particularly evident in collective forms of preservation like the diary archive in
Emmendingen (Germany) and in the auto/biography as a publishing mass phenom­
enon.
It is not too far fetched to accord autobiography in ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ ‘meth­
odological value’ per se, as Genin (2010) does and suggests in respect of Stuart Hall’s
autobiographical reflections. In the field of interculturality, in particular in respect
of intercultural autobiography, but also of the autobiographical basic structures of
travelogues, ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ approaches can propose solutions concerning
autobiographical theory desiderata.

Translation: Walter Köppe

 1.3 Cultural Studies 37

Works Cited
Assmann, Aleida. “Cultural Studies and Historical Memories.” The Contemporary Study of Culture.
Ed. Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr and Internationales Forschungszentrum
Kulturwissenschaften. Wien: Turia + Kant, 1999. 85–99.
Augé, Marc. Journal d’un SDF. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011.
Baldinger, Friderika. Lebensbeschreibung von Friderika Baldinger von ihr selbst verfaßt. Heraus-
gegeben und mit einer Vorrede begleitet von Sophie, Wittwe von la Roche. Offenbach: Weiß und
Brede, 1791.
Böhme, Hartmut, and Klaus Scherpe. “Zur Einführung.” Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften. Posi-
tionen, Theorien, Modelle. Ed. Hartmut Böhme and Klaus Scherpe. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996.
7–24.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984.
Fauser, Markus. Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch­
gesellschaft, 2003.
Frühwald, Wolfgang, Hans R. Jauß, and Reinhart Koselleck. Geisteswissenschaften heute. Eine
Denkschrift. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991.
Genin, Christophe. “L’autobiographie dans les études culturelles: Parler de soi a-t-il une valeur
méthodologique?” Filozofski vestnik XXXI.2 (2010): 10–25.
Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. La traversée des fleuves. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999.
Grossberg, Lawrence. “Globalization and the ‘Economization’ of Cultural Studies.” The Contempo-
rary Study of Culture. Ed. Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr and Internationales
Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften. Wien: Turia + Kant, 1999. 23– 46.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. Aspects of Working-Class Life, With Special References to
Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.
Lindner, Rolf. Die Stunde der Cultural Studies. Wien: Universitätsverlag, 2000.
Pfotenhauer, Helmut. Literarische Anthropologie: Selbstbiographien und ihre Geschichte – am
Leitfaden des Leibes. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987.
Schmidt, Siegfried J. “Gedächtnis – Erzählen – Identität.” Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der
kulturellen Erinnerung. Ed. Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1993.
378–398.
Wolf, Christa. Kindheitsmuster (1976). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007 [Patterns of Childhood.
Trans. Hedwig Rappolt and Ursule Molinaro. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984].

Further Reading
Bachmann-Medick, Doris, ed. Kultur als Text. Die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissen-
schaft. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1996.
Böhme, Hartmut, Peter Matussek, and Lothar Müller, eds. Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft. Was sie
kann, was sie will. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2000.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books,
1974.
Hahn, Barbara, ed. Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah
Arendt. München: Beck, 1994.
Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.
38 1 Theoretical Approaches

Hofmann, Martin Ludwig, Tobias F. Korta, and Sibylle Niekisch, eds. Culture Club. Klassiker der
Kulturtheorie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004.
Kittler, Friedrich. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft. München: Fink, 2000.
Neumann, Gerhard, and Sigrid Weigel, eds. Lesbarkeit der Kultur. Literaturwissenschaft zwischen
Kulturtechnik und Ethnographie. München: Fink, 2000.
1.4 Deconstruction
Linda Anderson

The term ‘deconstruction’ originated with, and is generally associated with, the writ­
ings of the French philosopher and theorist, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Derrida
uses the term ‘deconstruction’ in De la Grammatologie (1967) [Of Grammatology (1976)]
first of all in a fairly elliptical way to question the idea of truth as a presence – as
simply there – and as existing prior to linguistic signs; a belief Derrida termed “logo­
centrisme” [“logocentrism”] (Derrida 1967, 11 [1976, 11]). Instead Derrida proposes that
what is required is “la dé-sédimentation, la dé-construction de toutes les significa­
tions qui ont leur source dans celle de logos” [“the de-sedimentation, the de-con­
struction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos”] (Derrida
1967, 21 [1976, 10]), a process he opposes to straightforward “démolition” [“demo­
lition”] (Derrida 1967, 21 [1976, 10]). The distinction Derrida makes is an important
one, often lost in popular versions of his thinking. Whilst Derrida was interested in
questioning what is deemed obvious or given in our systems of meaning, it was not
in order to destroy in a nihilistic way but rather to reveal and understand how these
systems came into being in the first place, and the contradictions already inherent in
them. Derrida’s approach is not aimed at setting up deconstruction as a new theory or
establishing a superior vantage point of knowledge but at uncovering the instability
already at work, despite appearances, within every text, and following its conditions
of existence, including inevitably, what it has had to repress or hide to become itself.
He therefore always begins with a particular context or scene of reading (Royle 2003,
61), writing in response to, in or in the margins of other texts. According to Barbara
Johnson, Derrida is “first and foremost, a reader, a reader who constantly reflects on
and transforms the very nature of the act of reading” (Johnson 1981, x).
In De la Grammatologie Derrida moves through key moments in the history of
logocentrism, including the long-standing philosophic tradition of Aristotle, who laid
down the belief that a sign is always the representation of some pre-existing idea
or experience. In Christian theology the sign refers to a transcendental realm that
guarantees meaning: “La face intelligible du signe reste tournée du côté du verbe et
de la face de Dieu” [“The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word
and the face of God”] (Derrida 1967, 25 [1976, 13]). Derrida goes on to give Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and, in particular his Les Confessions (1782–1789) [Confessions] a key role
in the development of modern logocentrism, seeing his writing as simply exchanging
the self-presence of the subject for the presence of God. His discussion of Rousseau in
De La Grammatologie, though not addressing autobiography specifically, nevertheless
offers a very important intervention into theories of autobiography, providing a major
critique of ‘Romantic’ autobiography and Rousseau’s assertion in Les Confessions
that he can both access an authentic self which is ‘true to nature’ and make himself
transparent to the reader: “Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple et dont

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40 1 Theoretical Approaches

l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un home dans
toute la vérité de la nature; et cet home ce sera moi” [“My purpose is to display to my
kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself”]
(Rousseau 2011, 3 [1953, 17]).
Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau puts under scrutiny both the essentialist concept
of the self that seems to underpin Rousseau’s work and the belief in what it can lin­
guistically refer to. According to Rousseau, he turns to writing as a way of restoring a
presence that he can never adequately express through speech, where he feels ‘at a
disadvantage’. He thus hides himself and writes in order to re-appropriate a presence
within speech that never really existed for him. Writing is added to speech – it is a
supplement – a sort of “ruse […] artificieuse pour rendre la parole présente lorsqu’elle
est en verité absente” [“artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent”]
(Derrida 1967, 207 [1976, 144]). However, the word supplement, Derrida points out,
has in effect two meanings that coalesce, and cannot really be separated: supple­
ment carries the sense of both surplus and substitute. Whilst Rousseau may consider
writing as adding to nature, already thought of as plenitude or presence, it, in effect,
substitutes for its absence; it fills a void. As Derrida says, writing is “suppléant et
vicaire” [“compensatory and vicarious”], and, whilst it seems to provide the satis­
faction of presence, it does so “par signe et procuration” [“through sign and proxy”]:
“Mais le supplément supplée. Il ne s’ajoute que rem-placer. Il intervient ou s’insinue
à la place de; s’il comble, c’est comme on comble unvide” [“It intervenes or insinuates
itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as one fills a void”] (Derrida 1967, 208 [1976, 145]).
Whilst Rousseau’s text seems to gesture to what lies behind it, the real lives beyond
and behind the limits of the text, ultimately, according to Derrida, “il n’y a jamais eu
que de l’écriture” [“there has never been anything but writing”]; there has never been
anything but “supplements, des significations substitutives” [“supplements, substi­
tutive significations”] (Derrida 1967, 228 [1976, 159]).
The recognition that the subject requires language in order to constitute itself as a
subject – in other words the deconstruction of the humanist subject of autobiography
who can refer to a pre-existing self – may seem to pose an impossible dilemma for
autobiography as a genre. As Robert Smith has written:

To represent itself in order to constitute itself, the autobiographical subject needs a means of rep­
resentation, a language in short. And as soon as language becomes an issue for autobiographical
theory, any last footing ‘the autobiographical subject’ may have had gives way (Smith 1995, 58).

The ‘I’ that seems to refer to an authorial signified, becomes rather an illusion of
self-presence; ‘I’ becomes a position within language, a linguistic figure or trope.
However, it would be wrong to assume that deconstruction is thus simply at odds
with autobiography. As Derrida demonstrates throughout his complex and varied
oeuvre, autobiography can come back as a phantom – or as, what Smith calls “an
irritant” (Smith 1995, 5) – troubling the boundary between the life and the work, and
 1.4 Deconstruction 41

calling into question the systematic coherence of philosophic or rational discourse.

There remains a “singularity” in discourse that cannot be accounted for according to
a general law: “It becomes a general fact about rationality that it can never be general
enough” but has to form a contract with a sort of “‘low’ specificity”, with autobiogra­
phy and its “discreditable status” (Smith 1995, 5). Yet, paradoxically, it is also the case
for Derrida that if any writing were truly unique or singular it would not be available
to be read, and thus it always “entails a double-bind”. The singular is always bound
up with the general and has to participate in genre, context, and the conceptually
general dimension of meaning (Royle 2003, 120). Accordingly, for Derrida, though it is
commonly interpreted as one’s own mark and what belongs to the subject alone, there
is no absolutely singular ‘I’, there is no writing that one can make absolutely one’s
own. “I am not the proprietor of my ‘I’”, Derrida has said and there is always a sense
for him in which one can only write in terms of what has already been written, even as
one necessarily strives for and attains a certain idiom of one’s own (Derrida 2001, 85).
Derrida has often written in response to particular occasions: the death of friends,
a conference or an interpretation of a philosophical text. This is not accidental but
key to his understanding of how he writes ‘Jacques Derrida’ through a process of dis­
placement and transference on to someone else. For him “there is always someone
else”, even in the most private autobiography, even if that other remains unnamed.
Rather than think, therefore, of a self-identical subject, the subject becomes a place of
division. The experience of the ‘I’ would not be possible without an Other, a doubling
or repetition, which haunts it, and through which it becomes more than an instant/
instance. Writing about Nietzsche’s autobiographical text, Ecce Homo (1899), Derrida
(1982, 72) takes Nietzsche’s statement – “Und so erzähle ich mir mein Leben” [“I
am now going to tell myself the story of my life”] (Nietzsche 2007, 13 [1927, 7]) – and
demonstrates how ‘I’ constitutes itself through a return; the subject becomes himself
through the text he has written in an endlessly repeated gesture of affirmation. More­
over within this structure of return difference intervenes, a temporality, dividing the
‘I’ who speaks from ‘myself’ to whom my life is told. The ‘I’ is always a place of self-di­
vision, an addressor and an addressee. For Derrida the ear that hears a text is the ear
of the other, for the message ‘I’ send must pass through the labyrinthine passages
of the ear to be heard, risking not being heard or being heard differently, even if the
ear belongs to ‘myself’. A delay or detour is always involved in communication and
accordingly the signature never becomes effective at the time it is apparently signed
but later, when the other, with ears to hear it, has understood and deciphered it. The
time of autobiography is thus strangely dislocated and is not the time of life or the time
of writing that we think it is. For Derrida a text is “signé que par l’autre beaucoup plus
tard” [“signed only much later by the other”] and is always belated (Derrida 1982, 72
[1988, 51]).
In 1993, Derrida co-authored a text called “Circumfession” with the critic G ­ eoffrey
Bennington. Whilst Bennington contributes a scholarly and critical account of
­Derrida’s work that dominates the page, Derrida’s text runs along the bottom of the
42 1 Theoretical Approaches

page, as if in the margins. Though this is one of the most autobiographical texts that
Derrida wrote, being in part a response to his mother’s dying and death, it is also a
discussion of St Augustine’s Confessiones [Confessions], and Augustine’s own relation
to his mother. “Circumfession” enacts the way there is no singular text of the self but
rather a multiplicity of discourses, none of which is solely one’s own. Derrida plays
out a kind of duel with Bennington about who ‘owns’ the name ‘Derrida’, disrupt­
ing Bennington’s attempts at mastery with a fragmented, tormented text of his own.
However, Derrida also turns to circumcision, the Jewish ritual in which the foreskin
of the male child is cut off shortly after birth, as a figure or trope in this text for the
‘wound’ of singularity. The ritual of circumcision is at once a mark or sign enacted on
the body, and a ceremony of naming. It unites the singular body with the social and
the iterative, through a wound, a trauma. This wound is not remembered – Derrida
is not trying to recall the forgotten experience of circumcision – but is transferred
onto his body as a trace. As such is it like writing, carrying the marks or traces of
an origin it cannot represent but only endlessly repeat. The mother’s role within the
ceremony of circumcision is important to Derrida, for whilst the mother offers up the
son’s body for the sake of the name, she also weeps for him and experiences a pain
not recognised within the social ritual. His own pain recalls her inexpressible pain,
as he tries to approach her dying in his own writing and encounters the problem that
trying to speak to her, he inevitably speaks in her place. His text then encounters its
own impossibility in its relation to his mother; at once breached by what it cannot
represent, neither can it close in on what is outside it.
In his Mémoires d’Aveugle (1990) [Memoirs of the Blind (1993)] Derrida describes
the paradox of how, when language is spoken, it speaks to itself “cela veut dire de
l’aveuglement. Il nous parle toujours de l’aveuglement qui le constitue” [“which is to
say, from/of blindness. It always speaks to us from/of the blindness that constitutes
it”] (Derrida 1990, 11 [1993b, 4]). According to Derrida, a self-portrait depends on a
doubling or fold that makes representation possible. Consciousness cannot grasp
itself. If absolute presence were possible there would be no need for representation.
A self-portrait can only be produced with reference to another: “Comme les Mémoirs,
l’Autoportrait paraît toujours dans la reverberation de plusieur voix” [“Like Memoirs,
the self-Portrait always appears in the reverberation of several voices”] (Derrida 1990,
68 [1993b, 64]). It can exist only insofar as it is also blind to what it tries to see. Accord­
ing to Derrida it is a “simulacra ruineux” [“ruinous simulacrum”], a “fiction perfor­
mative” [“performative fiction”], seen only “au travers de l’aveuglement qu’elle produit
comme sa vérité” [“through the blindness that it produces as its truth”] (Derrida 1990,
69 [1993b, 65]).
Many critics have dissented from the way Derrida seems to privilege theoretical
preoccupations over specific texts, generalizing about the subject and writing in a
way that seems ultimately simply repetitive and that prevents the multiple different
voices of autobiography from emerging in his writing. This has been particularly
the case for those critics who have criticized the theoretical positioning of women
 1.4 Deconstruction 43

in deconstruction, where her theoretical status, troubling boundaries and limits, yet
gives her no voice of her own: “Women have always been exchanged in the service
of men’s subjectivity. Derrida may simply be offering a new twist to an old theme: he
exchanges women in the service of the deconstruction of men’s subjectivity” (Feder
and Zakin 1997, 41). Yet there is another view that would see Derrida as having made
a major contribution to the development of a feminism that instead of being allied to
a pre-given goal, such as legal and civil equality, is “committed to the full elaboration
of difference and its uncontrollable and uncontainable movements of differentiation
or becoming” (Grosz 2005, 92). It would certainly also be wrong to underestimate the
impact of deconstruction on the critical understanding of autobiography since the
1970s, even if it is as a point of controversy and argument. Deconstruction needs to
be reckoned with in critical accounts of autobiography. Derrida himself was critically
engaged with autobiography throughout his work, even though he disclaimed it as a
genre in any straightforward way. Asked, towards the end of his life, what the passion
was that drove him, Derrida suggested with characteristic equivocation that it was
autobiography or that rather “‘autobiography’ is perhaps the least inadequate name,
because it remains for me the most enigmatic, the most open, even today” (Attridge
1992, 34).

Works Cited
Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2011.
Attridge, Derek. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Acts
of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. 33–75.
Derrrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967 [Of Grammatology.
Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976].
Derrrida, Jacques. L’oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes et débats avec
Jacques Derrida. Montréal: VLB Èditeur, 1982 [The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference,
Translation: Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Peggy
Kamuf and Avitall Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988].
Derrrida, Jacques. “Circumfession.” Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida.
Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 3–315 (Derrida 1993a).
Derrrida, Jacques. Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Editions de la Réunion
des musées nationaux, 1990 [Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans.
Oscale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (Derrida
1993b)].
Derrrida, Jacques. “‘I have a Taste for a Secret.’” Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for a
Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. 1–92.
Feder, Ellen, and Emily Zakin. “Flirting with the Truth. Derrida’s Discourse with ‘Woman’ and
Wenches.” Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman. Ed. Ellen Feder, Mary
Rawlinson and Emily Zakin. London: Routledge, 1997. 21−51.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Derrida and Feminism: A Remembrance.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cul-
tural Studies 16.3 (2005): 88–94.
Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida. Disseminations. Trans. Barbara
Johnson. London: The Athlone Press, 1981. vii–xxxiii.
44 1 Theoretical Approaches

Royle, Nicholas. Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge, 2003.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Paris: Classique Garnier, 2011 [The Confessions of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau. Trans. J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953].
Smith, Robert. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Further Reading
Bradley, Arthur. Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Direk, Zeynep, and Leonard Lawlor, eds. A Companion to Derrida. Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2014.
Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991.
1.5 Discourse Analysis
Manfred Schneider

In what follows, ‘discourse analysis’ is treated as a method for understanding texts as

it was elaborated by the French historian of science, Michel Foucault. ‘Discourse anal­
ysis’ in this sense must be distinguished from other theories and methods that bear
the name ‘discourse analysis’ in Anglo-Saxon contexts. Foucault’s discourse analy­
sis guides a historical investigation of the effects of power which determine written
documents and whose traces are recorded in them. The other discourse analysis, in
contrast, is concerned primarily with linguistic usage at a given moment. Its field of
inquiry are social practices of speaking and writing, in so far as they not only serve
the purposes of communication but also simultaneously give rise to cultural or social
realities. In contrast to the linguistic analysis of language systems, of syntax and
semantics, or even of the history of language, discourse analysis within the meaning
of Foucault’s concept focuses on the structure, referentiality and coherency of spoken
languages (Brown and Yule 1983). Or if it takes a ‘political’ approach, discourse anal­
ysis observes how linguistic regulations constitute “activities, perspectives and iden­
tities” (Gee 1999, 4–5). Jørgensen and Phillips in this respect distinguish three areas:
‘discourse theory’, ‘critical discourse analysis’ and ‘discursive psychology’ (Jørgensen
and Phillips 2002). Whereas proponents of discourse theory, following Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe, assume an explicitly critical political stance and treat the speak­
ing subject as a (powerless) agent within the discursive field (Laclau and Mouffe
2001), discursive psychology operates two-dimensionally, in that it conceptualizes
agents as simultaneously subjects and objects of discourse, as “maîtres et esclaves”
[‘masters and slaves’] of language (Barthes 1980, 20).
Michel Foucault developed discourse analysis as a theory and history of the
written works of scholarship and science. Foucault wrote a series of theoretical works
about this method (Foucault 1969); yet he did not strictly adhere to his own methodo­
logical prescriptions. Foucault replaced the usual depictions of the history of science
and ideas with an investigation of ‘discursive formations’. These are – simply put –
the conditions and regulations of speech and knowledge beyond grammar. Such an
inquiry is concerned with the question of what it is possible to say and know in a
given period of time. The unity of discourse constitutes the ‘énoncé’ [‘statement’]. The
analysis of discourse in terms of unities of statements enables the investigation of the
presuppositions that have made possible what has been written and said in the past
(and has made other statements impossible).
With respect to autobiography, this means first of all that autobiographical state­
ments are not ascribed primarily to the authors themselves, that is, to such mental
capacities as knowledge, consciousness, or education; rather, these statements are
subjected to the fundamental question of how they came about. By no means are
the statements which have been referred to as ‘autobiography’ since the beginning

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46 1 Theoretical Approaches

of the nineteenth century in Germany self-evident. Discourse analysis does not

accept the highly influential contention by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch that a
self-consciousness developed over the course of the eighteenth century, as a result
of enlightenment and education, which then became observable in the narrative of a
life story, and that its genesis can be read from the history of autobiography (Dilthey
1981; Misch 1949). Discourse analysis instead raises the question of the discursive
and medial conditions of possibility of these statements. Drawing on Nietzsche,
Foucault also referred to his method of inquiry as a ‘genealogy’. In order to achieve
evident results, genealogy deals with a “grand nombre de matériaux entassés” [“a
vast accumulation of source material”] and searches for the origin and presuppo­
sition (the historical apriori) of these mountains of texts (Foucault 1994, 136 [1980,
140]). The culture of autobiography has generated an enormous amount of printed as
well as unprinted texts. In the view of discourse analysis, autobiographical culture
does not consist of great individual works, but is the result of a pervasive and insti­
tutionally regulated activity, one that has been recorded in voluminous archives. Dis­
course analysis thus directs its line of inquiry not primarily at the great works or the
exemplary autobiographical statements, but at the historical circumstances whose
effects remain legible in those documents which have hardly received any scholarly
attention.
Western autobiographical culture originates in the introduction, by the highest
papal authority, of the duty to confess for the entire Christian world, as well as in
the institution of the procedures of Inquisition for ecclesiastic criminal trials by the
Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The ‘confessio’ is a central element of both the ‘forum
internum’ (confession) and the ‘forum externum’ (criminal trial) (Schneider 2007).
Augustine’s Confessiones already emanate from the early Christian praxis of confes­
sion and penance (Watkins 1961). A discourse analysis which proceeds genealogically
and is dedicated to the “analyse d’un champ multiple et mobile de rapports de force”
[“analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations”] (Foucault 1976, 135 [1978,
102]), takes as its starting point this foundational act of the Lateran Council. There
is considerable agreement about this connection (Zimmerman 1971; Foucault 1976;
Schneider 1986). Foucault explains the implications of the regulations decreed in 1215:
“L’homme, en Occident, est devenu une bête d’aveu” [“western man has become a
confessing animal”] (Foucault 1976, 80 [1978, 59]). Yet the “confessing animal” and
its discourse is not simply determined by the authorities of the ‘confessio’, cloisters,
courts, and priests as agents of this cultural process, but by subtle relations of power,
institutions, compulsions or binding conventions which do not operate from a single,
all-determining node of power. According to Foucault’s study in the first volume of his
Histoire de la sexualité (1976) [The History of Sexuality (1978)], the (autobiographical)
confession is the effect of a veritable willingness on the part of subjects to comply
with the requests being made upon them and to thereby confess their biographical
truth as issuing from an intimate interior. The two forums of confession constitute the
institutional matrix of the Western culture of autobiography.
 1.5 Discourse Analysis 47

This willingness emerges out of a network of institutions that became increas­

ingly refined over the centuries. The autobiographical confession originally transpired
orally. Yet after a phase of exclusive orality, the obligation to confess soon expanded
to an imperative to write. Even before the Tridentine Council of the mid-sixteenth
century made it a duty to conduct a (written) self-assessment before every confession
and hence initiated the transition to the literary ‘confessio’, the writers of manuals of
confession, such as Jacopo Passavanti in the middle of the fourteenth century, had
already called for such written duplicates of memory: “fare una memoria per iscrit­
tura” [‘making a memory by written documents’] (Passavanti 1865, 144–145). Literate
believers were to use a written memorandum to prepare for the confession and supply
a list of actions and thoughts that needed to be confessed. However, such a record of
sins was not only to be written for the occasion of the confession, but should contain
daily observations as well. The protocol of an auto-interrogation condensed the ‘con­
fessio’ from a yearly into a daily cycle. At the same time, it constituted the origin of dia­
ristic religious self-scrutiny and self-monitoring (Beadle 1656), which in turn served
many authors as the basis for autobiographical confession (Delaney 1969). That the
culture of autobiography started with religious institutions and collective obligations
is revealed by the individual life stories stacked in many repositories. The archives of
various monasteries in France still house to this day mountains of biographies of nuns
from the seventeenth century (Le Brun 1987). Local congregations and their archives
sustained the autobiographical culture of Puritans and Quakers in England, which had
already formed in the sixteenth century (Haller 1957). Likewise, there are thousands of
hand-written biographies in the archives of the Moravian Brethren (Glitsch 1899). This
praxis of collective transcription and archiving of biographies follows from the reli­
gious collections of vitae. The collections of Vitae Patrum from the early middle ages,
attributed to Hieronymus (Hieronymus 1481/1482) and Tyrannius Rufinus (Rufinus
1990), contain the partly legendary, but also partly verified, narratives of the lives of
prominent saints.
The lives of nuns and monks were fundamentally structured by the imitation of
such (auto)biographies. For centuries, ‘imitatio’ [‘imitation’] was, in accordance with
the Regulae Benedicti, the goal of the ‘lectio’ [‘reading’] of exemplary lives of saints
in monastic culture. Augustine’s Confessiones narrate a grandiose example of the bio­
graphical chain reaction set into motion by an ‘imitatio’ of an ‘imitatio’ of an ‘imitatio’.
One eagerly depicted his own religious conversion as the effect of reading biogra­
phies and autobiographies. Petrarch considered himself as influenced and prompted
to write his own confession of a life by the Confessiones. Petrarch structured his Secre-
tum meum [Secretum (Petrarch’s Secret)] as a confessional dialogue with Augustine
(Petrarch 1975). With the help of the printing press, ‘imitatio’ later developed into a
mass culture. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the (German) book market
indexed a growing supply of religious (auto)biography collections. Among these were
Johann Henrich Reitz’s Historie der Wiedergebohrenen [‘History of the Reborn’], pub­
lished in seven parts between 1698 and 1745, Gottfried Arnold’s Leben der Altväter
48 1 Theoretical Approaches

[‘Lives of the Forefathers’] (1700) and the Leben der Gläubigen [‘Lives of the Faith­
ful’] (1701), Gerhard Tersteegen’s Außerlesene Lebens-Beschreibungen Heiliger Seelen
[‘Selected Life Stories of Holy Souls’] (1733–1753), as well as Christian Gerber’s Historia
derer Wiedergebohrnen in Sachsen [‘Histories of the Reborn in Saxony’] (1726–1729).
Around the end of the seventeenth century, autobiographical culture became interac­
tive. Readers now considered themselves called upon to chronicle their own examples
of a pious life worthy of imitation. Gottfried Arnold concludes the ‘historical report’
of his edition of the Lebensgeschichten christlicher Altväter [‘Life Stories of Christian
Forefathers’] in 1700 with the request that readers submit recent biographies of pious
persons to the publisher: „Beliebte jemanden zu diesem Vorhaben eine und andere
Materien beyzutragen, und an den Ort des Verlages von diesem Buche einzusenden,
sollte es mit Danck erkannt werden“ [‘If it might please someone to contribute mate­
rials for this project by sending them to the place of publication of this book, this will
be recognized with a word of gratitude’] (Arnold 1700, 43). Such an updated collection
could already appear in print a year later (Arnold 1701). The degree of dissemination
of these anthologies in the eighteenth century can be calculated not only based on the
numerous editions, reprints and imitations (Schrader, in Reitz 1982, vol. IV, 127). Even
Arnold himself referred to how there was already an „ungeheures Meer“ [‘monstrous
sea’] of „Vitis oder Lebens-Beschreibungen, Martyrologiis […], Actis Sanctorum […]
Calendariis […]“ [‘vitae or life stories, Martyrologiis (…), Actis Sanctorum (…) Calen­
dariis’] (1700, 31). Many prominent authors of the period attest to the wide impact of
the works of Arnold and Reitz. Karl Philipp Moritz and Heinrich Jung-Stilling recall in
their autobiographies how as youths they read the Historie der Wiedergebohrenen and
Das Leben der Altväter (Moritz 1972, 18; Jung-Stilling 1968, 52). Even earlier, members
of Pietistic congregations considered themselves obligated to write their life stories
along the lines of the model of conversion stories and narratives of rebirth (Niggl
1977, 6). In accordance with these directives, a great number of ‘authentic’ testimonies
of personally experienced instances of grace were collected in church repositories,
and then in part made their way into printed collections. The autobiographical con­
versions recorded therein consistently follow the narrative pattern of August Hermann
Francke’s Anfang und Fortgang der Bekehrung von A. H.F. [‘Beginning and Progress
of the Conversion of A. H.F.’] from 1690, which reiterates the phases of Augustinian
confession.
The genealogy of autobiographical discourse thus captures the ways that the
‘self-consciousness’ of autobiographers is based on compulsions to write, incitements,
and collective practices that have filled voluminous archives. Because it can be traced
back to the institution of the confession in 1215, this new confessional praxis was
indeed religious at first, but clerical interest was also always disposed to medicinal
and psychosomatic statements. The confessional fathers first asked for confessional
loyalty, but later for political loyalty as well. In Germany, the Pietistic political scien­
tist Friedrich Carl Freiherr von Moser introduced a national politics of the biograph­
ical and autobiographical in the twelve-volume Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland
 1.5 Discourse Analysis 49

[‘Patriotic Archive for Germany’] (1784–1790), which he then resumed with the Neues
Patriotisches Archiv [‘New Patriotic Archive’] (1792–1794). In the preface to the first
volume of the Archive, Moser also appealed to ‘friends of truth and fatherland’ to con­
tribute to the periodically published volumes. It was then Johann Gottfried Herder
who continued to pursue Moser’s politics of the national archive and called for an
archive of the Germans, an “Athanasium, ein Mnemeion Deutschlands” [‘Athanasium,
a Mnemeion of Germany’] in his review of Schlichtegroll’s Nekrologen [‘Necrologies’]
from 1791 in the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität [‘Letters on the Advancement of
Humanity’]. This was supposed to create an institutional memory out of the biogra­
phies and autobiographies of significant (German) men (Herder 1881, 25). In response
to Herder’s proposal in the Letters, such an archive of immortality was published in
six volumes between 1791 and 1806, with the title Bekenntnisse merkwürdiger Männer
von sich selbst [‘Confessions of Remarkable Men Written by Themselves’] (1791–1806).
Thus, after 1780 scholars and public figures were bombarded with requests for partici­
pation in a great (auto)biographical discourse in the form of confessions, biographies,
obituaries and tributes. Among the authors of such appeals was the physician Johann
Gottlieb Fritze, whose Aufruf zu Selbstbiographien [‘Request for Autobiographies’] was
published posthumously in 1795 in the Deutsche Monatsschrift [‘German Monthly’].
Fritze also desired an extensive collection of such autobiographies.
Soon everyone was being asked. The founders of the Magazin zur Erfahrungs-
seelenkunde [‘Journal for Psychology from Experience’] directed an appeal to all
readers to inquire about, gather and pass on the biographies of “Missetäter und Selb­
stmörder” [‘malefactors and suicidal persons’], of “Wahnwitzigen und Schwärmer”
[‘lunatics and enthusiastic dreamers’] (Moritz 1978, vol. I, 1–2). The institution of this
new archive around 1780 provides another early example of interactive media. In the
nine volumes of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde were published numerous
confessions and case studies submitted by readers. And in the orbit of the new psy­
chology one finds plenty of evidence that the authors invested their testimonies with
the highest expectations of a moral, religious, and political cure. Already beforehand,
in his Lebensbeschreibung [‘Description of a Life’] of 1738, the clergyman Adam Bernd
called upon all those suffering from mental illness to document their particular case
for the sake of everyone else (Bernd 1973). In a diary of the year 1771 written in English,
Lichtenberg notes: “[…] if I could publish the history of my private life, millions could
be brought to virtue […]” (Lichtenberg 1971, 615). In the preface to his Tagebücher
[‘Diaries’] of 1773, Johann Kaspar Lavater thanked everyone in advance who submitted
a similar “wahre Geschichte seines Lebens und seines Herzens” [“a genuine history of
his life, and his heart”] (Lavater 1773, XXV [1795, XX]). He preferred the study of these
documents to every other “außerbiblischen Lesung” [“I should prefer the reading of
such a book to the perusal of any one else, the Bible excepted”] (Lavater 1773, XXV
[1795, XX]). The reading of such writings attained here a liturgical status similar to the
lectio of Vitae Patrum in medieval monasteries. This is further attested by the diction
of the nineteen-year-old Ludwig Börne, who declared in a letter to Henriette Herz in
50 1 Theoretical Approaches

1805: “Menschen wie ich sollten es sich zur heiligsten Pflicht machen, ihre Biographie
bekannt zu machen, ich werde es auch thun” [‘People like me should make it their
most holy duty to make their biographies known to others, and I will do so’] (Börne
1968, vol. IV, 122).
The nineteenth century finally elevated self-representation to an object of gram­
mar-school discipline. Educational institutions took over the concept of monastic
self-attestation of a biography and preserved it well into the second half of the twen­
tieth century. Yet they no longer expected the representation of religious awakening
and instances of grace that had once counted toward the quota of dutiful self-rep­
resentation, but rather the experience named ‘education’. The early works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, for instance, contain five different autobiographies written by the pupil in
Schulpforta between 1854 (as a ten-year-old) and 1861. Here the religious model of a
life story recurs in different variations (Nietzsche 1994, I, 1., 33–34, 276).
The origin of self-representation out of both forums is conspicuous not only in
Nietzsche’s later autobiographical text Ecce Homo; the same can be said for many
other literary autobiographies (Schneider 2013). For discourse analysis it is thus
evident that autobiography is not a genre (Niggl 1977), but the transcription of a
complex institutional praxis that has without a doubt generated extraordinary literary
texts. If one wished to correlate these transcripts, which are stored by the thousands
in school archives, with a history of self-consciousness, self-consciousness would be
a monotone (literary) affair. These findings further suggest that literary genres do not
arise from an entelechy of their own, but from a literary praxis of schooling. Ever
since secondary schools and universities have ceased to practice poetics and rhetoric,
literary genres have dissolved. The discourse analysis of autobiography can hence
also demonstrate that, seen from a literary perspective, modern self-consciousness is
a school-consciousness.

Translation: Charlton Payne

Works Cited
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Auffs Neue erläutert und vermehrert. 2 vols. Halle: Verlag des Waisenhauses, 1700.
Arnold, Gottfried. Das Leben der Gläubigen, Oder Beschreibung solcher Gottseligen Personen,
welche in denen letzten 200 Jahren sonderlich bekandt worden. Halle: Verlag des Waisen-
hauses, 1701.
Barthes, Roland. Leçon/Lektion. Französisch und Deutsch. Antrittsvorlesung im Collège de France.
Gehalten am 7. Januar 1977. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980 [“Lecture”. October 8 (1979): 3–16].
Beadle, John. The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian. London: E. Cotes for Tho. Parkhurst, 1656.
Bernd, Adam. Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung (1738). Ed. Volker Hoffmann. München: Winkler, 1973.
Börne, Ludwig. Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. Inge Rippmann and Peter Rippmann. Vol. I–III: Düsseldorf:
Melzer, 1964, Vol. IV–V: Darmstadt: Melzer, 1968.
Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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Delaney, Paul. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1969.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910).
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [Selected Works. The Formation of the Historical World in the
Human Sciences. Vol. III. Ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2002].
Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969 [The Archaeology of Knowledge.
Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2002].
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [The History
of Sexuality. The Will to Knowledge. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978].
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory and Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry
Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. 139–164.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche: la généalogie, l’histoire.” Dits et écrits 1954–1988. Vol. II. Ed. Daniel
Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 136–156.
Francke, August Hermann. “Anfang und Fortgang der Bekehrung August Hermann Franckes” (1690)
(extract). Pietismus und Rationalismus. Ed. Marianne Beyer-Fröhlich. Leipzig: Reclam, 1933
[“From the Autobiography 1692.” Pietist Selected Writings. Ed. Peter C. Erb. Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1983].
Fritze, Johann Gottlieb. “Über Selbstbiographien.” Deutsche Monatsschrift 1 (1795): 156–168.
Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Theory and Method. London/New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Gerber, Christian. Historia derer Wiedergebohrnen in Sachsen, Oder Exempel solcher Personen,
mit denen sich im Leben, oder im Tode viel merckwürdiges zugetragen; So wol aus gewissen
Urkunden als eigener Erfahrung gesammelt. Dresden: R.C. Saueressig, 1726–1729.
Glitsch, Alexander. Geschichte und gegenwärtiger Bestand der historischen Sammlungen (Archiv,
Bibliothek, Gemäldesammlung) der Brüder=Unität. Herrnhut: Verlag des Unitätsarchivs, 2nd
ed. 1899.
Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and
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1957.
Hieronymus: Vitae sanctorum patrum, sive Vitas patrum. Köln: Conrad Winters de Homborch,
1481–1482, http://dfg-viewer.de/v2/?set[image]=37&set[zoom]=default&set[debug]=
0&set[double]=0&set[mets]=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.
de%2Fitems%2FESDIUXGVVBGITSBPUKO6CPHFVR33GKZF%2Fsource (14 October 2013).
Jørgensen, Marianne, and Louise J. Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London/
Thousand Oaks/New Dehli: Sage, 2002.
Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich. Henrich Stillings Jugend. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – Towards a radical demo-
cratic politics. London/New York: Verso, 2nd ed. 2001.
Lavater, Johann Kaspar. Unveränderte Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eins Beobachters seiner
selbst. Rev. Christoph Siegrist. Bern/Stuttgart: Haupt, 1978 [Journal of a Self-Observer; or, Con-
fessions and Familiar Letters. Vol. II. Trans. Peter Will. London: T. Cadell jun./W. Davies, 1795].
Le Brun, Jacques. “Das Geständnis der Nonnenbiographien des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Selbsthemati­sie­
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furt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 248–264.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Schriften und Briefe. Sudelbücher II, Materialhefte, Tagebücher.
Vol. II. Ed. Wolfgang Promies. München: Hanser, 1971 [Selections: Philosophical Writings. Ed.
and trans. Stephen Tester. New York: State University of New York Press, 2012].
52 1 Theoretical Approaches

Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I, part 1. Frankfurt a. M.: G. Schulte-
Bumke, 1949 [A History of Autobiography. Vol. I, part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge,
1950].
Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungsseelenkunde.” Gnothi sautón
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August Mylius, 1783–1793.
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Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994.
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Petrarca. Vol. 1. Ed. Antonietta Buffano. Turin: Unione tipografico editrice torinese, 1975 [Secre-
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Schneider, Manfred. Die erkaltete Herzensschrift. Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert.
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Schneider, Manfred. “Autobiographie als Institution. Eine Skizze mit zwei Nachspielen.” Literatur
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Tersteegen, Gerhard. Außerlesene Lebens-Beschreibungen Heiliger Seelen […]. 3 vols. Frankfurt/
Leipzig: Böttiger, 1733–1753.
Watkins, Oscar D. A history of penance: being a study of the authorities (1920). 2 vols. New York:
Franklin, 1961.
Zimmermann, T. C. Price. “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance.” Renaissance.
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1971. 119–140.

Further Reading
Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris:
Galilée, 1984 [“Otobiographies.” The Ear of the Other, Otobiography, Transference, Transla-
tion: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Avital Ronell.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988].
 1.5 Discourse Analysis 53

Lejeune, Philipp. Je est un autre. L’autobiographie, de la littérature aux médias. Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1980.
Mehlman, Jeffrey. A Structural Study of Autobiography. Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss. Ithaca/
London: Cornell University Press, 1974.
Schneider, Manfred. “Politik der Lebensgeschichte um 1800 und das autobiographische Wissen
im Theoriedesign des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Poetologien des Wissens um 1800. Ed. Joseph Vogl.
München: Fink, 1999. 267–288.
1.6 Gender Studies
Anne Fleig

Within literary studies, the relationship of gender and genre is the focal point of
Gender Studies; this is particularly true for the study of autobiographical writing.
In this context, questions pertaining to the interrelations between the writing self,
literary form and social context are crucial. A scholarly engagement with autobiog­
raphies written by women, along with inquiries into female circumstances of daily
life and the extent to which female authors figure in (literary) history, is thus a major
concern. Against this backdrop, Gender Studies provides a critical vantage point on
the aesthetic criteria and genre conventions that led to an exclusion of women from
the literary canon, as well as on notions of subjectivity that are inextricably tied to
male biographies and concepts of male authorship.
From the 1970s onwards, Gender Studies has challenged international research
on autobiography time and again to question the existing concept of genre (Gilmore
1994; Smith and Watson 1998; Hof and Rohr 2008). Even the basic assumption that an
autobiography constitutes the literary representation of an individual’s life story and
personality rests on gender-specific preconditions; this holds true both for the pro­
duction and reception of autobiographical texts. Autobiography as a genre raises high
expectations in regard to authenticity and reality content by negotiating the respec­
tive relationship between human experience and writing in each individual case.
The research of the last two decades has increasingly criticized these expectations,
strongly emphasizing the fictional character of autobiographical self-representation
instead (Ashley et al. 1994). Autobiographical texts raise a number of questions: if and
how far autobiography produces authenticity; which patterns the genre provides for
this process; and who can claim the authority (and authorship) to make use of these
patterns. Genres govern the expectations of readers, but they also set up boundaries
for interpretation and lead to hierarchical structures, which in turn produce histori­
cal as well as theoretical exclusions. This is the point where the critique of genre and
feminist criticism intersect (Hof 2008).
What Leigh Gilmore terms “fantasies of the real” (1994a, 16) assumed particu­
lar importance for the autobiographies of women and their exploration by Gender
Studies: although literature written by female authors was frequently thought to be
inherently autobiographical, remarkably few texts by women found their way into the
autobiographical canon. From early on, female writing was subjected to an ambiv­
alent evaluation; despite the fact that it carried positive connotations of enhanced
authenticity, naturalness and verisimilitude, it was excluded from the canon on the
grounds of an alleged lack of literariness. It is not by accident that the so-called ‘golden
age of European autobiography’ around 1800 coincides with the establishment of
male concepts of authorship. Autobiography understood as a representation of the
life stories of ‘great’ men became prevalent in the nineteenth century, while female

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-007
 1.6 Gender Studies 55

autobiographical texts were denigrated as unsophisticated and unliterary (Stanford

Friedman 1988). As early as 1929, Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking autobiographical
essay, A Room of One’s Own, reflects critically on the exclusionary processes affecting
the works of female authors. The autobiographical self criticizes the lack of published
literature by women which stands in marked contrast to the overrepresentation of
women as a literary ‘sujet’, especially in novels written by men. Another important
aspect is the fact that the economic preconditions of literary production are not avail­
able to women to the same degree as they are to men (the “room of one’s own” refers
to both financial independence and personal freedom).
Woolf’s theses were repeatedly picked up by feminist literary studies in the 1970s
and 1980s (Showalter 1977 [1982]; Bovenschen 1979; Weigel 1983). In reference to the
lacking canonicity of autobiographical works by women, Domna C. Stanton coined the
term “The Female Autograph”, thereby moving the emphasis from the representation
of a life story to the writing of the self (Stanton 1995 [1984]). By pointing towards the
distinction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ at an early stage of feminist criticism, Stanton’s term
also questioned essentialistic notions of referentiality. Current scholarship considers
literary representations of the self to be permeated by implicit and explicit gender-spe­
cific assumptions from the very outset, which in turn contribute to gender-specific
constructions of belonging. Since the 1970s, the debate on “The Death of the Author”
(Barthes 1967) and the questioning of traditional autobiographical theory, along
with new social concepts of subjectivity, has led to a conspicuous boom of autobio­
graphical writing expressed in new literary forms (Kosta 1994). Autobiography can
today be termed a “privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersec­
tion of feminist, postcolonial and postmodern critical theories” (Smith and Watson
1998, 5). Within recent genre theory, the concept of ‘autofiction’ addresses the con­
structedness of autobiographical texts. This concept represents a renewed challenge
for Gender Studies in that it emphasizes the historic preconditions of authorship and
permits an ironic play with subject positions (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2009), while the lit­
erary representations of real-life experiences of women and men are pushed into the
background.

History
Gender Studies has addressed questions and problems of autobiography from its very
beginnings. Initially, feminist criticism of (auto)biography had the objectives of identi­
fying female life stories, making women’s daily life visible, and inscribing women into
male-dominated (literary) history. As a result, various research projects located auto­
biographical texts by women and established archives of female autobiography on an
international scale (Jelinek 1980; Vogt 1981; Goodman 1986; Sagarra 1986; Neuman
1991; Heuser 1996; Niethammer 2000; Boynton and Malin 2005).
56 1 Theoretical Approaches

A critical review of existing research quickly made it obvious that the autobio­
graphical subject was conceptualized as implicitly or explicitly male, with classifying
statements on autobiography being derived exclusively from texts written by men.
Furthermore, female authors were excluded due to the fact that traditional autobi­
ographical research evolved out of the humanities and its concern with the history
of personality development, origins it shares with research on the ‘Bildungsroman’
[novel of formation]. Dilthey describes autobiography as “Deutung des Lebens in
seiner geheimnisvollen Verbindung von Zufall, Schicksal und Charakter” [“an inter­
pretation of life in its mysterious combination of chance, destiny, and character”]
(Dilthey 1989, 24 [2002, 96]). In his History of Autobiography, which went through
several re-editions and revisions over the years, Georg Misch – following Johann Gott­
fried Herder – calls autobiographies “Bekenntnisse merkwürdiger Männer” [“confes­
sions of outstanding men”] (Misch 1949 [1907], 3 [1950, 1]), that feed on a “Bewußtsein
der Persönlichkeit” [“consciousness and evaluation of personality”], which in turn
forms the “Kern der europäischen Selbstbesinnung” [“the most direct impulse to the
growth of self-scrutiny” (‘in the western world’)] (Misch 1949, 18 [1950, 15–16]). Even
as late as 1956, Georges Gusdorf assumed that “[m]any great men, and even some not
so great – heads of government or generals, ministers of state, explorers, business­
men –” write autobiographies in old age (Gusdorf 1980, 28). Based on an examination
of exclusively male autobiographies, research claimed to retrace what is essentially
an ideal-typical, step-by-step development of the human personality, while the con­
structedness of this model remained entirely unquestioned. The socio-historical turn
in literary studies did little to rectify the prevailing view of men and women, with the
latter surfacing only as a “Randgruppe” [‘marginal group’] (Niggl 1989, 9), if at all.
Even Philippe Lejeune’s Le pacte autobiographique (1975) [The Autobiographical Pact
(1979)], an essay that still remains essential as a basis for current research, discusses
an exclusively male cast of authors. As in Dilthey’s day, texts by the triumvirate of
Augustine, Rousseau and Goethe remain at the center of current European research
on autobiography.
In contrast, feminist engagement with female autobiographies aimed to expand
and alter the male-biased canon by adding female voices. Simultaneously, another
quintessential task was to reflect on the fundamentally male character of auto­
biography as a genre, and to question the aesthetic criteria that led to the exclusion
of women from the literary tradition (Benstock 1988). The autobiographical subject’s
determinedness by gender thus became tangible, while autobiography itself could
now be conceptualized as a narrative or pattern of order with a male prefiguration.
Nevertheless, a critical reflection of gender-specific conceptions of subject and genre
within autobiographical research and theory formation is by no means to be taken for
granted, and still remains a largely unfulfilled desideratum.
As early as the eighteenth century, there is a mutual influence between theoretical
concepts of genre and authorship such as Friedrich von Blankenburg’s Versuch über
den Roman [‘Essay on the Novel’] (1774) and a literary practice that focused on the
 1.6 Gender Studies 57

biographies of male characters, e. g. the ‘Bildungsroman’. Around 1800, the power

of creation came to be attached to concepts of male authorship (Humboldt, Fichte,
Hegel); at the core of these concepts lies the dualism of production and reproduc­
tion that ultimately denies women the sine qua non of traditional autobiography: the
development of an individual personality and the self-conscious shaping of one’s own
life, which corresponds to the literary shaping of the autobiographical text. Theoret­
ical contributions from the nineteenth century continued to concentrate on works of
male authors, and Thomas Carlyle’s famous treatise, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the
Heroic in History (1840), established a focus on the ‘great men’ of history. Such works
continue to inform conceptions of biographic writing to this day.
In adherence to bourgeois gender discourse with its clear-cut division of society
into a female, private sphere and a male, public one, theories on autobiography link
notions of socio-historical greatness and narrative relevance to being male (Ní Dhúill
2009, 202). Autobiography thus came to be a genre dedicated to concerns from the
spheres of public life and employment, which requires and demands a self-conscious
autobiographical subject. The interplay of gender and genre becomes readily apparent
here.
As a direct consequence of genre conceptions deriving from bourgeois construc­
tions of masculinity, autobiographies by women were denied entry into the canon.
This fact notwithstanding, research from Women Studies and Gender Studies (e. g.
Heuser 1996; Meise 2002; Kormann 2004) has provided ample evidence of female auto­
biographical writing from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, e. g. in the
context of courtly culture and in the area of spiritual or religious practice. In general,
early feminist works on autobiography confirmed the assumption of a fundamental
alterity of female writing, an assumption supported by bourgeois theories on genre
and autobiography as well as by established patterns of autobiographical writing.
In her survey of autobiographies written by women, Estelle Jelinek posits the frag­
mentedness of female writing and its concentration on the private sphere in a manner
similar to Roy Pascal. According to Jelinek, male autobiographies differ in that they
are more self-contained and coherent, aiming at a stringent development of the auto­
biographical self. In addition to this, men provide a portrait of their times along with
their own life story, whereas female autobiographies dedicate themselves more to the
domestic sphere (Jelinek 1986, XIII). However, this perpetuation of bourgeois gender
dualism has been criticized along with the fact that the male norm, which perma­
nently casts female writing as the Other, remained unquestioned.
Particularly in the USA, the engagement with female autobiography provoked a
lively discussion as to which criteria are applicable to autobiographical texts penned
by female authors. Autobiography was discovered as a genre that allows women
to speak up, to tell their own stories. In the Anglophone world, the relevant catch­
phrases were “coming to the text” or “coming to speak” (Larsson 2007, 157). In Western
Germany, Verena Stefan’s autobiographical novel Häutungen (1975) [Shedding (1978)]
became one of the key texts in the debate on female subjectivity and its literary rep­
58 1 Theoretical Approaches

resentation. Describing a successful process of emancipation from traditional gender

roles appeared to offer an opportunity for authentic female writing beyond male, het­
eronormative phantasies and projections – especially to the feminist movement of the
1970s. However, this approach was criticized early on within literary studies due to
the fact that the persisting idea of natural, unrestricted speech reproduces male-dom­
inated notions of femininity (Kolkenbrock-Netz and Schuller 1982).
With the emergence of Postcolonial Studies, feminist debate on divergent notions
of the subject grew more heated as black women criticized the white and western
implications of the concept of subjectivity. Numerous studies showed that black
women and women of color had been rendered invisible by feminist research on auto­
biography, just as women in general had been disregarded by traditional modes of
inquiry into autobiographical texts. In 1991, Shirley Neuman pointed out that neglect­
ing the categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’ is a problem that also affects gender-critical
autobiographical research (Neuman 1991, 5). Despite this, an intersectional and trans­
cultural stance had already been adopted by studies such as Françoise Lionnet’s Auto-
biographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989). Early key works on Black
(Women’s) Autobiography (Smith 1974; Smith Foster 1976; Andrews 1986; Braxton
1989) were primarily concerned with slave narratives, autobiographical testimonials
that originated in the USA during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a pro­
found effect on the Black American Autobiography to come. In comparison, Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) or Audre Lorde’s Zami. A New Spelling
of My Name (1982) are autobiographical texts that exemplify literature’s ability to
negotiate multiple conceptions of identity. Today, Gender Studies and Postcolonial
Studies share a mutual interest in the ways in which identity, culture and society
intersect.

Conceptual Aspects
The intellectual involvement with autobiographical writing within Gender Studies did
not take place in isolation from inter- and intradisciplinary theoretical developments.
While early research focused on the various biographies themselves in the wake of
socio-historical approaches within literary studies, conceptions of identity and con­
structions of corporeality and subjectivity have moved to the center of interest follow­
ing the Linguistic Turn.
As a consequence of Jacques Lacan’s and Michel Foucault’s radical critique of the
subject, (auto)biographical research has shifted attention from the investigation of
female biographical testimonials towards the question of how subjectivity is consti­
tuted, and which gender-specific implications derive from it. Psychoanalytical contri­
butions by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who subjected Freud’s and
Lacan’s theories to feminist revision, also had a strong impact on academic discourse.
 1.6 Gender Studies 59

Nancy Chodorow’s concept of female selfhood is of particular importance for the

discussion of female identity within feminist research on autobiography. In a similar
vein to deconstructive approaches (Derrida, de Man, Paul Jay), Chodorow’s theory
on the relatedness of subjectivity cast doubt on the notion of a subject envisioned
as an autarchic and coherent entity. Subsequent research drew further attention to
the relational embeddedness of subjectivity in social and historical contexts (Stanley
1992, 4), thereby rendering any particular emphasis on the uniqueness of a person
highly suspect. The approach to examine isolated, pre-eminent biographies was thus
subjected to a fundamental review.
The question of how subjectivity can be conceptualized beyond pre-existing clas­
sifications is central to the various theoretical constructions now in existence. The
term itself is contaminated by traditional notions of male subjectivity and individ­
uality: on the one hand, this leads to the ascription of texts written by women to a
female collective and to the negation of their individuality (Benstock 1988); on the
other hand, there is the danger of neglecting the importance of a culturally produced
group identity for women and minorities (Stanford Friedman 1988).
Since the 1990s, postmodern and subject-critical considerations constitute an
important prerequisite for gender-critical (auto)biographical research. From that point
on, numerous surveys have recognized the notion of a coherent, autonomous subject
as a (patriarchal) construction (Stanford Friedman 1988; O’Brien 1991; Dausien 1992);
this criticism includes the literary form in which the respective constructions of the
subject present themselves. Accordingly, the term ‘autobiography’ is used less fre­
quently and has been replaced by terms such as ‘autobiographical writing’, ‘women’s
autobiographical practices’, ‘women’s personal narratives’ or ‘women’s lifewriting’
(Smith and Watson 1998).
In addition to this, the question of female subjectivity is interconnected with
the question of the referentiality of autobiographical texts. Approaches that see the
construction of gender and genre realized in the textuality of autobiography (Stanton
1995) are confronted with conceptions tying female subjectivity to referentiality, and
ultimately to human experience. Meyer (1989) and Volkening (2006) discuss in how far
the feminine can be conceptualized as a function of autobiographical writing. In this
context, the connection between autobiography and the performativity of gender con­
stitutes an important thematic field. Anna Babka, for example, conceives the perform­
ative construction of gender as a fiction – as autobiography, as it were (Babka 2002,
63). In the wake of the theoretical contributions of Judith Butler and Teresa de Lau­
retis, the continuing perpetuation of the heterosexual matrix within Gender Studies
came to be problematized (Neuman 1991, 8). As a result, a number of works dealing
with lesbian identity, feminist theory and autobiographical texts were published (see
Stimpson 1992; Martin 1997), quickly followed by surveys dealing with concepts of
queer identity (Bornstein 1995; Smith and Watson 1998).
The criticism leveled by Postcolonial Studies against universal concepts of mas­
culinity and femininity had a particularly unsettling effect on approaches to auto­
60 1 Theoretical Approaches

biographical research based on feminist assumptions of equality. This is also true

for Butler’s concept of gender performativity. Theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak have made it clear that the female subject addressed by universalistic feminist
theories is conceptualized as implicitly white. In light of this, the autobiographical self
has to be problematized as a western construct predicated on certain historical and
cultural assumptions of superiority. Western conceptions of subjectivity thus perpet­
uate a perspective of colonization (Smith and Watson 1992; 1998).
Gender Studies continues to face the challenge of making texts by female authors
visible without designating them as a marginal phenomenon, or even as the Other
(Finck 1999, 115). Dealing exclusively with texts written by women gives a new lease
of life to the problematic assumption of a female ‘écriture’ that is categorically dis­
tinguishable from male literary production; gender also remains unilaterally asso­
ciated with femininity. As an alternative, texts written by women and men can be
scrutinized in regard to similarities and differences; theory and practice of autobio­
graphical writing can be examined for gender-specific implications; finally, gender
as a relational category of analysis can also be included when engaging with texts
by male authors (Kormann 2004). With these considerations in mind, Almut Finck
has proposed to analyze the autobiographical subject in its “multiple[n] Positionalis­
ierung” [‘multiple situatedness’] (Finck 1999, 132). This implies an investigation into
the contextual situatedness of the writer within a certain field, as opposed to the mere
addition of individual ascriptions of identity frequently encountered in the debate on
intersectionality.
The controversy on the relationality of gender and genre unites Gender Studies
and postcolonial criticism, and it can well be considered the key question for auto­
biographical research. Not only does this concept involve women as well as men – it
also opens up a perspective on new literary forms and on the diversity of autobio­
graphical practices which results from transgressing the borders of gender and genre.
Since the end of the 1990s, relationality has come to be subsumed under the keyword
‘belonging’: belonging in its most general sense can be understood as a circulation
of intensities between the subject and its changing surroundings (Hilfrich 2011). This
concept shifts the focus of inquiry towards the multiple and volatile situatedness of
female and male authors, i. e. towards a relational notion of genre. This relationality
also becomes evident in the significance of spaces for autobiographical theory which
owe their increasing importance to the concept of belonging. Accordingly, Bell Hooks
conceptualized belonging as a “culture of place” (Hooks 2009) in her autobiographi­
cal and essayistic writings.
Reservations prompted by the pitfalls and contradictions of feminist research on
autobiography notwithstanding, the project of inscribing female authors into literary
history is far from being completed. As long as current research on autobiography
(particularly in the German-speaking world) continues to focus almost exclusively
on texts written by men while aspects of gender are largely overlooked, the disregard
of mainstream researchers for female autobiography will remain on the agenda of
 1.6 Gender Studies 61

Gender Studies. At the same time, mechanisms of exclusion have to be taken into
account and the dominance of white, male narratives has to be questioned. A double,
or better yet, a multiple perspective on autobiography should be the guiding cogni­
tive principle of Gender Studies. This is not only true where the debate on ‘sex’ and
‘gender’ is concerned; a wider range of theoretical intersections like race, ethnicity
and sexuality (Gilmore 1994b, 13) is involved here – with in their relationality, these
terms have a particularly profound influence on autobiography and autofiction. The
relationship between gender and genre outlined at the beginning of this chapter thus
remains a challenge for future research.

Translation: Martin Bleisteiner

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Further Reading
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
1.7 Hermeneutics
Ulrich Breuer

Historically, scientific autobiography research started with the hermeneutical

approach to autobiography. In the context of philosophical hermeneutics, where a
life is essentially thought of as history, autobiography, which until the start of the
twentieth century had primarily been understood as a cultural-historical document
(Glagau 1908), started to become a paradigm of humanities. The way this field of
study treats autobiography is quite different from the approach taken by the natural
sciences. However, the rise in autobiography’s epistemological value is also associ­
ated with a fateful constriction: because hermeneutical methodology was restricted
to the humanities, autobiography research was long ago cut off from natural-sciences
approaches, even though the hermeneutic circle is also compatible with theories of
cognitive psychology. From a systematic perspective, hermeneutics commits autobi­
ography research to the traditional ‘understanding of others’ and thus is kept locked
in processes of unending convergence on an individually created and context-related
richness of meaning passed down in a given culture. To this extent, the rise in the
epistemological appreciation of the genre is ambivalent. Although the premises of the
hermeneutical theory of autobiography have been largely rejected since the 1970s, this
theory has nevertheless remained productive to the present day.
Scientific autobiography research came about in the larger context of the reor­
ganisation of the sciences that occurred in the late nineteenth century. It draws on
older concepts of European cultural criticism, particularly German, yet views itself
as a reflection of their continuity. These concepts include the Enlightenment’s prin­
cipal anthropological motto: “The proper study of Mankind is Man” (Pope 1950, 53),
which establishes a categorical analogy between self-awareness and insight into
human nature. As a basic methodological axiom, it is also based on Rousseau’s auto­
biography. Accordingly, the individual and his self-understanding were dependent
on context, an assertion put forward, in particular, by Johann Gottfried Herder, who
felt that the autobiography is a “lehrendes Exempel” [‘instructive example’] (Herder
1987, 676) because it reveals man’s position between liberty and determination. For
this reason, Herder conceived of the genre as an educational resource. However, after
studying the first part of Rousseau’s Les Confessions, he denied that confessions had
any educational value and instead accorded such value solely to pragmatic autobiog­
raphies, like the one by Benjamin Franklin. Herder later also politicised autobiogra­
phy by making it a medium of national education. Central aspects of this hermeneu­
tics-based educational programme were implemented by Goethe in his autobiography
Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] (1808−1833). It does not follow the French
type (Rousseau) but rather the American one (Franklin), which in the nineteenth
century thus became the norm that also guided the hermeneutical theory of autobio-
graphy.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-008
 1.7 Hermeneutics 65

This type of theory is a reaction to the fundamental crisis in philosophical thought,

which in the late nineteenth century saw itself as being challenged by the achieve­
ments of the natural sciences. In an effort to save the historically focused sciences,
the influential philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey drew a sharp distinction between the
humanities and the natural sciences in his late work Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen
Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910 [2002]) [The Formation of the Historical World
in the Human Sciences]. The humanities are defined by their subject matter and their
method. Humanity, which according to Dilthey forms the subject matter of the human­
ities, for him is not a physical circumstance but rather a “Zusammenhang von Leben,
Ausdruck und Verstehen” [“the nexus of lived experience, expression, and under­
standing”] (Dilthey 1981, 98 [2002, 109]). As a result, life is equivalent to history. In
his notes from the period 1906–1910, which were later published in 1927, the meaning
of humanity as an historical interrelationship was spelled out in more detail. In addi­
tion, in the first part of the ongoing contiuity, the basic humanities concepts of expe­
rience, expression, and understanding were explained in more detail and exemplified
by the autobiography.
For Dilthey, the paradigmatic character of the autobiography for the humanities
results from its quintessential nature: It shows how life can be understood. Accord­
ingly, Dilthey writes that “[d]ie Selbstbiographie ist die höchste und am meisten
instruktive Form, in welcher uns das Verstehen des Lebens entgegentritt” [“In auto­
biography we encounter the highest and most instructive form of the understanding
of life”] (Dilthey 1981, 246 [2002, 221]). Because hermeneutics establishes the discipli­
nary independence of the humanities, and because the autobiography gives expres­
sion to life understood, i. e. the intellect, autobiography can become the model for
the genuinely historically focused humanities. Moreover, since an autobiography by
someone who discovers interrelationships in his life is identical to that by someone
who creates interrelationships through engagement with a certain milieu, the auto­
biographical understanding differs from the historical one due to its particular prox­
imity, to its particular intimacy with the intellect (Dilthey 1981, 246 [2002, 222]). Ele­
mentary hermeneutics of human existence finds expression in the autobiography,
which Dilthey calls ‘Selbstbesinnung’ [self-reflection] (Dilthey 1981, 247 [2002, 222]).
It is elemental because it always has to look for meaning in life processes and their
expression. ‘Ready meaning’ must never be attributed to life. Dilthey sees the axiom
as being realised, above all, in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth].
However, he is less interested in the literary form of the autobiography, emphasising
merely the wide historical variety of autobiographical forms (Dilthey 1981, 244–247
[2002, 221–223]).
Even beyond autobiography, man’s reflection about himself always constitutes
interrelationships. It therefore draws on the temporal structure of each experience,
which is tied to the dimensions of the time, to the framework of past, present, and
future. From each of these dimensions, life as a whole becomes visible, though dis­
torted in perspective. But for Dilthey, life becomes understandable as an interrela­
66 1 Theoretical Approaches

tionship only from the standpoint of the past, as a function of memory. It is memory
that gives meaning to values (past) and objectives (future) and thus synthesises life
ex post facto into an intellectual interrelationship. For Dilthey, the fundamental her­
meneutical concept of meaning is therefore not just the most important category of
historical thinking (Dilthey 1981, 249 [2002, 223]) but also the fundamental category of
his theory of autobiography. At the same time, he ties this theory to a canon of highly
meaningful texts (Augustinus, Rousseau, Goethe, etc.).
In the theory of autobiography, Dilthey’s historical hermeneutics is now consid­
ered to be a difficult burden. Criticism has been directed to the metaphysically charged
concept of the intellect, without which it is impossible to resolve the basic herme­
neutical conflict between understood subject and understood object, let alone the
equivalence of individual and genre, as well as to the idealistic remnants in Dilthey’s
theory of time (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 21–23). If, on the other hand, one accepts the
theory of time, then one of the strengths of the hermeneutical approach is the sceptical
realisation, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s criticism of historicism, that in the search for
meaning, memory must artificially fixate on onward-flowing life and thus inhibit, even
destroy, the experiencing of the present. Put another way, autobiographies not only
bring about and demonstrate interrelationships; they also destroy presence. In other
words, a central theme of current hermeneutics criticism (Gumbrecht 2004) (albeit
in itself astonishingly autobiography-like) is already embedded in the hermeneutical
theory of autobiography. Moreover, this theory reveals that historical or anthropologi­
cal understanding can basically reach only partial notions of life’s interrelationships.
This prompted Dilthey to position autobiography, and with it, the individual, against
every form of historical and philosophical generalisation – a decision that, as early
as the 1920s, was hardly a convincing one due to its proximity to relativism. Finally,
Dilthey’s lack of interest in the form and structure of the autobiography, as well as in
its role in cultural politics, undoubtedly contributed to the waning acceptance of his
approach, particularly in literary studies.
Dilthey’s student and son-in-law, Georg Misch, made Dilthey’s humanities herme­
neutics – but not his posthumous theory of autobiography – the basis of a monumen­
tal genre criticism of the autobiography. In 1900 the Prussian Academy of Sciences
(to which Dilthey had belonged since 1887) announced a prize competition for
researching and depicting the history of the autobiography. The three, hand-written
volumes that Misch then submitted to the Academy were awarded the top prize in 1905
(Misch 1949, VII). Misch later suggested that it was his results that prompted Dilthey
to elevate the autobiography to a paradigm of philosophical hermeneutics (Lembeck
1999–2000, 67). The Geschichte der Autobiographie [A History of Autobiography] was
published in eight volumes between 1907 and 1969. It depicts the development of the
genre in Europe (as well as, in part, in Asia and America) from antiquity to the broadly
covered Middle Ages and early modern times and on to the late nineteenth century.
It remains today by far the most comprehensive testimonial to hermeneutical autobi­
ography research.
 1.7 Hermeneutics 67

In his introduction, Misch stresses the importance of Herder for the appreciation
of, and research into, autobiography (Misch 1949, 4 [1950, 2]). From Goethe, he derives
the leading point of view regarding self-action. The leading point of view is to treat
“die autobiographischen Schriften in den verschiedenen europäischen Sprachen als
Zeugnisse für die Entwicklung des Persönlichkeitsbewußtseins der abendländischen
Menschheit” [“the autobiographical works in various European languages are here
studied as revealing the ways in which the individual’s sense of personality has devel­
oped in the Western World”] (Misch 1949, 5 [1950, 9]). In other words, at the centre
of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography are allegorical readings, which view
autobiographical texts as masks of the increasingly self-aware individual. Although
the autobiography should be understood both as a literary genre and as an elemen­
tal form of life experience (Misch 1949, 6 [1950, 4]), the philosophy-of-life approach
clearly has priority over the genre-poetological one. Just as with Dilthey, questions of
form play only a subordinate role, since the autobiography itself is an expression of
life that is not tied to any specific form (Misch 1949, 6 [1950, 4]). For this reason, Misch
claims that it is also incapable of definition but rather can at best be delineated by an
explanation of the genre’s name: Autobiography, says Misch, is “die Beschreibung
(graphia) des Lebens (bios) eines Einzelnen durch diesen selbst (auto)” [“the descrip­
tion (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (auto)”]
(Misch 1949, 7 [1950, 5]). From the structure-endowing feature of the autobiography,
which he interprets (while avoiding the difference between author and narrator) as
identity between the depicting and the depicted individual, Misch derives the inti­
mate approach of autobiography, which Dilthey also emphasises, both to the particu­
lar facts and to the totality of the individual’s life history. And, just as with Dilthey,
the relationship between the facts and the totality of the individual’s life is brought
about by the category of meaning: As historian of himself, the autobiographer accords
meaning ex post facto to the facts of his life. For this reason, Misch, too, believes that
autobiography deserves the status of a paradigm for historically focused humanities.
It owed this status because of its genuine philosophical claim to truth. Because
autobiographies serve human self-awareness (Misch 1949, 13 [1950, 10]), they with­
stand all sceptical, deterministic, and biologistical attempts at reduction. The phil­
osophical ennobling of the autobiography at the same time commits genre criticism
to important texts, to a canon. From a typically hermeneutical perspective, the truth
in these texts lies not in the individual parts of the autobiography but rather “in dem
Ganzen, das mehr ist als die Summe der Teile” [“in the whole works, each of which is
more than the sum of its parts”] (Misch 1949, 13 [1950, 10]). As with Dilthey, this total­
ity is identical with the intellect, which regains consciousness through self-awareness
and dedicates itself to the reader in the structure of the narrative, its style, and its
inner form (Misch 1949, 13 [1950, 10–11]).
It is therefore always characteristic of the canonical autobiography that there is a
unity of “Individualität und Formgestalt” [‘individuality and form structure’] (Misch
1949, 14). Its truth is that of the individual who has taken form. As an individual
68 1 Theoretical Approaches

truth, it is rationally inaccessible and essentially inexhaustible: “In das Geheimnis

der Persönlichkeit dringt gewiß kein Begriff” [‘Indeed, no concept can penetrate the
mystery of personality’] (Misch 1949, 15). Accordingly, hermeneutics once again finds
itself reliant on form, since this provides an “objektives, demonstrierbares Abbild von
der Struktur der Individualität” [“objective, indeed, demonstrable image of the struc­
ture of individuality”] (Misch 1949, 16 [1950, 13]).
Among the strengths of the hermeneutical approach is its expansion (adopted
by Herder as well) of intellectual criticism to include cultural and, latently, form criti­
cism, since both autobiographers and the forms they chose consistently gain a specific
profile in the context of the overall culture of various epochs and ethnicities (Misch
1949, 16 [1950, 13]). A blind spot in the theory becomes evident in its ideal type, which
places the focus on neither the self nor the world but rather mediates between the two
poles. Only autobiographies meeting this ideal type contribute to European self-reflec­
tion, because they work “im hellen Licht steigender Kulturarbeit” [“in the clear light
of advancing civilization”] (Misch 1949, 18 [1950, 16]) at ‘liberating and deepening
life’. As a result, the hermeneutical theory of autobiography elaborated by Dilthey and
Misch is marked not merely by the idea of progress but also by massive eurocentrism,
which follows from the instrumentalisation of the autobiography in the eighteenth
century as a tool of educational and national politics.
The most important contributions to a hermeneutical theory of autobiography thus
turn out to be reading strategies legitimated by philosophy and, potentially, also by
cultural politics. They treat the autobiographical text and its specific form as a super-
ficial phenomenon, beneath which an allegorical reading has to discern the growing
self-understanding of European personality and present it in its exemplariness. Up
until the 1970s, this reading strategy was widespread in the theory of autobiography.
The hermeneutical theory of autobiography was developed in philosophy. It was
not adapted for literary studies until the 1940s and 1950s. In the process, it was exis­
tentially and aesthetically transformed in characteristic fashion. This can be made
clear with two examples: During World War II, the German anglicist Horst Oppel
attempted to split the hermeneutical theory of autobiography. On the one hand, he
claimed that the genre had a historical “Ursprünglichkeit” [‘originality’] founded
on the wholehearted identification of the autobiographer with “in bestimmter Zeit
und in bestimmtem Raum vollbrachte[m] Schicksal” [‘his destiny as achieved at a
certain time and in a certain space’] (Oppel 1942, 41). On the other hand, he argued
that autobiography was also something late and posterior and is due to merely sec­
ondary reflection (Oppel 1942, 44). In line with the Stefan George Circle, Oppel wants
to save the existential originality of the autobiography from its posteriority. For this
reason, he concentrates the hermeneutical theory of autobiography completely on the
poet autobiography. The originality of its character as work, he says, is based neither
on historical developments nor on national or individual peculiarities but rather on
a methodical devaluation of the concept of time (Oppel 1942, 51). He asserts that this
alone can compel the reader to truly take seriously the man and his work as an internal
 1.7 Hermeneutics 69

whole within the poet (Oppel 1942, 53). Because literary studies truncates the moment
of posterity from the hermeneutical theory of autobiography the theory’s irrational
implications come to the fore.
The French philosopher and epistemologist Georges Gusdorf felt otherwise. In his
transformation of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography in 1956, he once again
united originality and posteriority and at the same time adopted the metaphysics
of the intellect. In this way, he faces autobiography close to autofiction. Similar to
Dilthey and Misch, Gusdorf also feels that in the autobiography, the mysterious being
of the individual is up for debate (Gusdorf 1989, 124) and, like Oppel, that it depicts
meanings that lie beyond time (Gusdorf 1989, 135). However, this being and the mean­
ings attributed to it are not created originally but instead after the fact. To this extent,
the autobiography is, for Gusdorf, an “Apologie oder Theodizee des persönlichen
Wesens” [‘apologia or theodicy of one’s own being’] (Gusdorf 1989, 136). In contrast
to the historical and the literary, Gusdorf once again stresses the anthropological role
of the autobiography. Its truth, which is always comprehensible only symbolically,
is the product of a meaningful writer, who creates himself in the structuring of his
experiences. This places the autobiography in proximity to the novel, which Gusdorf
asserts is merely an autobiography assigned to an intermediary (Gusdorf 1989, 144).
Just as with Oppel, Gusdorf also sees the hermeneutical theory of autobiography as
disclosing an internal whole of life and work: “Leben, Werk und Autobiographie sind
somit drei Aspekte derselben Aussage, die durch ein System dauernder Interferenz
zusammengehalten werden” [‘Life, work, and autobiography are thus three facets of
the same expression, held together by a system of permanent interference’] (Gusdorf
1989, 146–147). Because in autobiography, an important person depicts his own life
as legend (Gusdorf 1989, 147), autobiography research should no longer be conducted
(in the sense of Georg Misch) as genre criticism but instead – e. g. in the sense of the
Nietzsche biography by Ernst Bertram – as personal mythology.
A strong echo of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography with simultaneous
departure from its existential and aesthetic transformations can be found in Ralph-
Rainer Wuthenow’s literary-studies work on the European autobiography of the eight­
eenth century. Here the hermeneutical approach is transformed comparatively, as well
from the standpoint of social, cultural, and literary criticism. Reminiscent of Dilthey’s
and Misch’s hermeneutics is both the idea of progress – since by means of the autobi­
ography, the development of self-consciousness (Wuthenow 1974, 21) is to be traced
all the way to the autonomous self (Wuthenow 1974, 10) – and the double meaning of
the autobiographical undertaking, in literary studies and in the philosophy of life, as
life that is narrated as well as construed in the narration, the experienced and remem­
bered self (Wuthenow 1974, 37). Even Misch’s eurocentrism is found again ‒ put crit­
ically yet cautiously ‒ when the autobiography is defined as a “wesentlich europäis­
che literarische Form” [‘an essentially European literary form’] (Wuthenow 1974, 18).
With respect to the problem of memory, Wuthenow stresses, much like Gusdorf, that
in the autobiography, the individual creates himself in the images that he makes of
70 1 Theoretical Approaches

himself (1974, 20). The comparative transformation of hermeneutics likewise begins

to approximate the concept of autofiction.
Since the 1970s, hermeneutical autobiography research has been a part of those
déclassé cultural assets that are largely determined by the quotidian understanding of
the genre. In autobiography research, the genre has been disparaged from a psycho­
logical, constructivist, and deconstructive perspective, as well as from the standpoint
of social and reader-response criticism, but this has not put an end to the approach
once and for all. On the contrary, particularly from an interdisciplinary standpoint, it
has proved to be exceptionally productive. This can be seen in two recent works, both
of which look into the underlying structures of the autobiography.
One of them is rooted in educational theory, which has used the autobiography
as a source since the late 1970s. In 1989 there was a notable attempt to link the herme­
neutical theory of autobiography with neurobiological findings. To this end, Thomas
Hartge started with the hermeneutics of autobiographical experience (1989, 9) but
went beyond the linguistic form of these experiences and took into account their
pre-linguistic dimension. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, he was interested in the
underlying structure and the subtext, in short, in the ‘other’ of autobiographical dis­
course. In order to be able to reveal the logic behind the transformation of pre-lin­
guistic experience (images, emotions, kinaestheses), Hartge united the philosophy of
reflection with neurobiology. He was particularly interested in the various activities
of the right (intuitive/creative) and left (rational/analytical) hemispheres of the brain.
The individual’s inaccessibility, inexhaustibility, originality, and mysterious charac­
ter, to which Dilthey, Misch, Oppel, and Gusdorf all referred, was now explained by
the intuitive/creative activities of the author’s right brain. Hartge therefore empha­
sizes the great weight that even partial linguistic ability of the non-dominant hemi­
sphere has for hermeneutical considerations (1989, 74). Hartge claims that this finds
expression particularly in the rhetoric of the autobiographical text, especially in its
metaphors and symbols.
Underlying structures were also the focus of the German studies scholar Ralf
Simon. Like Dilthey, he was interested in the basic epistemological constellation of
the autobiography (Simon 1994, 116). Simon’s hypothesis reinterpreted Dilthey’s her­
meneutics of elementary thought processes from the standpoint of narratology. He
claims that autobiography raises the elementary underlying structure of all narrativ­
ity to the level of the textual surface (Simon 1994, 111). In contrast to to Lejeune (but
sometimes in agreement with him), as well as in contrast to de Man, autobiography
again becomes a paradigm: It is to be thought of as a model of fundamental fiction­
alisation of everything called understanding (Simon 1994, 112). The interrelationship
of life, which for Dilthey was due in part to elementary thought process and in part to
the objective intellect, was instead understood from a constructivist standpoint as the
superficial staging of elementary hermeneutics (Simon 1994, 112). Because it presents
patterns of interpretation that make it feasible in the first place, the autobiography
is, in an elementary sense, just as fictional as all true understanding. For this reason,
 1.7 Hermeneutics 71

it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction in this genre: The poetry of autobio­
graphical discourse makes the question of truth or fiction indistinguishable and thus
puts it in constant flux (Simon 1994, 115). By also proposing new solutions for such
persistent sets of problems as the aestheticity, identity, authenticity, and originality
of the autobiography, Simon maintains the hermeneutical theory of autobiography in
ongoing discussion.
New philosophical works on the hermeneutics of the individual (Kramer 2001)
draw on autobiography as well, but they do not start from Dilthey but from the her­
meneutics of Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, seeing the autobiography as a model
for the narration of life.

Works Cited
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1981 [The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans.
Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002].
Glagau, Hans. Die moderne Selbstbiographie als Quelle historischer Erkenntnis. Marburg: Elwert,
1903.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller.
Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986 [Poetry and Truth. From my own life. Trans.
Minna Steele Smith. London: George Bell & Sons, 1908].
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Diesseits der Hermeneutik: Die Produktion von Präsenz. Trans. Joachim
Schulte. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004.
Gusdorf, Georges. “Voraussetzungen und Grenzen der Autobiographie” (1956). Die Autobiographie:
Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 121–147.
Hartge, Thomas. Das andere Denken: Hermeneutische Perspektiven einer erziehungswissenschaft­
lichen Autobiographieforschung. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1989.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Werke. 3 vols. Vol. II. Ed. Wolfgang Proß. München/Wien: Hanser, 1987.
Holdenried, Michaela. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000.
Kramer, Christine. Lebensgeschichte, Authentizität und Zeit: Zur Hermeneutik der Person. Frankfurt
a. M.: Lang, 2001.
Lembeck, Karl-Heinz. “Selbstbiographie und Philosophiegeschichte.” Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philoso-
phie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 12 (1999–2000): 58–72.
Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I, part 1. Bern: Francke, 3rd ed.
1949 [A History of Autobiography. 4 vols. Vol. I, part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge,
1950].
Oppel, Horst. “Vom Wesen der Autobiographie.” Helicon 4 (1942): 41–53.
Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man. Ed. Maynard Mack. London: Methuen & Co., 1950.
Simon, Ralf. “Zwei Studien über Autobiographie: I. Autobiographie als elementare Hermeneutik.”
Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 29 (1994): 111–129.
Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.
Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. Das erinnerte Ich: Europäische Autobiographie und Selbstdarstellung im
18. Jahrhundert. München: Beck, 1974.
72 1 Theoretical Approaches

Further Reading
Goldmann, Stefan. “Leitgedanken zur psychoanalytischen Hermeneutik autobiographischer Texte.”
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 23 (1988): 242–260.
Jaeger, Michael. Autobiographie und Geschichte: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Misch, Karl Löwith, Gott­
fried Benn, Alfred Döblin. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1995.
Jung, Matthias. Hermeneutik zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 4th ed. 2012.
Langer, Daniela. “Autobiographie.” Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. II. Ed. Thomas Anz. Stutt-
gart/Weimar: Metzler, 2007. 179–287.
Nübel, Birgit. Autobiographische Kommunikationsmedien um 1800: Studien zu Rousseau, Wieland,
Herder und Moritz. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994.
1.8 History
Volker Depkat

For historians autobiographies are sources of evidence, and as such are historical doc­
uments providing information about past realities. In reading autobiography as mate­
rial enabling the analysis of historical persons, events, situations, and movements,
historians apply a concept of ‘reality’ to the reading of autobiography that continues
to be largely informed by the nineteenth-century historicist tradition. This tradition
demands that the historian reconstruct the past as it actually was – “wie es eigentlich
gewesen” in the words of Leopold von Ranke (Ranke 1874 [1824], vii). Historians thus
approach autobiography as a form of referential writing that, by way of induction,
allows them to reach through the text to the factual context behind it. This treatment
of autobiography is, of course, based on the premise that author, narrator, and protag­
onist of an autobiography are identical.
When historians speak of autobiography, they usually mean the classic form of
retrospective self life writing that covers the whole lifespan of its author, or at least
large parts of it, usually in the form of a chronological narrative. Grouping self life
writing into the larger class of personal writing, which also includes diaries and
letters, historians largely adhere to a concept of autobiography as defined by French
theorist Philippe Lejeune, who sees autobiography as a “[r]écit rétrospectif en prose
qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, losqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie
individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personalité” [“Retrospective prose nar­
rative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his
individual life, in particular the story of his personality”] (Lejeune 1975, 14 [1989, 4]).
This definition of autobiography as a retrospective narrative in prose about a lived life,
focusing on the story of the author’s own personality, refers to an essentially Western
practice of self-referential writing that, emerging in the eighteenth century, is deeply
indebted to the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous individual, its unique indi­
viduality, and its quest to find a place in society.
In categorizing modes of autobiographical writing, historians distinguish between
‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’, with memoirs being life narratives of public figures of
prominence and ‘weight’, who chronicle their professional careers, describing their
life and times with a focus on the public sphere, events of historical import, or the
character and actions of other prominent and historically important contemporar­
ies. While the term ‘memoir’ refers to the personal recollections of an already social­
ized individual often bracketing one moment or period of experience rather than the
whole life span, the term ‘autobiography’ is applied to life narratives that, following
the pattern of a ‘Bildungsroman’, reconstruct how the narrator was socialized, how he
found his place in society and how he became a social subject aware of his purpose in
the world (Neumann 1970, 9–42; Henning 2012, 21–24, 32–34; Smith and Watson 2012,
3–4, 10, 274–275).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-009
74 1 Theoretical Approaches

While this generic distinction between ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ is thor­

oughly problematic and potentially fruitless in light of the current debate about ‘life
writing’ as the more inclusive “general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or
another’s, as its subject” (Smith and Watson 2010, 4), it continues to be crucial in the
field of historiography. This is largely so because historians, being more interested in
public figures and their historical actions than in the private struggles of historical
individuals trying to become social subjects, until very recently have mostly drawn on
texts that qualify as memoirs (Crane 2006, 434–435). Historians are primarily focused
on social time not individual time, collective phenomena not individual idiosyncra­
sies, and in the public life not in the private life of historical actors. This hierarchy of
interests is behind historians’ preoccupation with the self life writings of men of power
and the elites, such as statesmen and politicians, generals, business leaders, clergy­
men, famous authors and artists, etc., and it is this concentration on decision-makers
and intellectual elites, which cements a distinction between the private and the public
sphere that characterizes much of the work of historians to this very day. Historians,
therefore, research collective time and experiences, while autobiography, as Jeremy
D. Popkin reminds us, “adopts the arbitrary time frame of the individual and the per­
spective of the individual” that is describing “the past from the inside, filling in the
dimension of motives and reactions that the outside observer can never fully know”
(Popkin 2005, 11, 6).
In recent years, the traditional focus on ‘great men’ and public figures has been
challenged by feminist, poststructuralist, anthropological and postcolonial criticism
as male-dominated, elitist, eurocentric and frequently ethnocentric (Leckie 2004).
This criticism has produced a new interest in the self life writings of individuals from
groups hitherto marginalized because of their race, gender, ethnicity, class, or sexual
orientation, as these autobiographical texts were seen as crucial for expanding the
scope of historical research to reach a fuller understanding of bygone times, and
to question, correct, complete, and complicate the grand narratives about the past
(Smith and Watson 2010, 222–225; Gilmore 1994; Hornung and Ruhe 1998; Ulbrich et
al. 2012). While the critique of the conventional approaches to autobiography flowing
from various sources has led to a multiplication of autobiographical forms and genres
worthy of a historian’s attention, the discussion in the field continues to be dominated
by a focus on written modes of autobiography. Historians still must come to grips with
performative, visual, filmic, or digital forms of self-presentation and self-thematiza­
tion as autobiographical acts, and include them in their source criticism.
That being said, autobiographical texts are classical sources of historiography,
which are used to explore a wide variety of research questions for all historical
periods. Generally speaking, historians using autobiographical texts either hope to be
able to reconstruct a historical actor’s thoughts and feelings, motivations, and inten­
tions, or they read them in the search for factual information – usually relating to the
human condition or atmospheric circumstances – that cannot be drawn from official
records or other documents. Finally, reading autobiographical texts seems worth­
 1.8 History 75

while for historians because they promise thick descriptions and detailed portrayals
of bygone times from the perspective of somebody who experienced them. For all of
these reasons, historians have not only analyzed autobiographies as sources, they
have also collected, documented, and edited autobiographical material from all centu-
ries to secure, broaden, and enrich the available source base for the study of the past.
If we take a closer look at how historians have used of autobiographical material,
the first thing that has to be noted is the omnipresence of autobiography in the field
of historical biography, life course analysis, and psychobiography (Klein 2009; Mar­
gadant 2000; Ambrosius 2004; Runyan 1982; Smith and Watson 2010, 5–9). This inter­
est in autobiographical material was largely forged by historicism with its actor- and
agency-centered view of the past, which holds the ideas, values, motives, feelings,
perceptions, and reactions of historical actors to be important factors for explaining
the course of history (Iggers 1968). Frequently connected to this interest in autobiogra­
phy was a quest for behind-the-scenes information not found in official records, that
is those bits and pieces of information relating to the overall atmosphere in meeting
rooms and at negotiating tables, or to the personal chemistry between contemporaries
etc. (Depkat 2003, 450; Henning 2012, 23, 41).
In some ways related to the uses of autobiography as biographical sources are
projects investigating the history of individuality and subjectivity. This tradition goes
back to Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Georg Misch (1878–1965), who saw autobiog­
raphies as sources paving paths into the history of the Western consciousness of per­
sonality – “Zeugnisse für die Entwicklung des Persönlichkeitsbewußtseins der abend­
ländischen Menschheit” [“autobiographical writings […] are […] revealing the ways
in which the individual’s sense of personality has developed in the Western world”]
(Misch 1949, 5 [1950, 3]). In recent years, this traditional field has substantially been
transformed and enriched by feminist, postcolonial, and anthropological criticism
that, while still interested in notions of individuality, subjectivity, and personality, has
opened our eyes to the multitude of alternative identity concepts beyond the white,
male, and Western norm (Margadant 2000; Popkin 1999; Crane 1996, 2006).
Under the auspices of the social history turn occurring in the 1960s/1970s, the
source value of autobiographical material was thoroughly reassessed (Depkat 2003,
451). Unfolding as a fundamental critique of the historicist persuasion, social history
devalued the historical importance of individual actors and challenged the very
concept of individuality as such, arguing that all individuality was historically deter­
mined by larger socio-economic forces, anonymous processes, and societal structures.
On the basis of this fundamental critique of historicism, one strand of social history
went into the field of statistical analysis that abandoned all hermeneutic and interpre­
tive forms of investigation altogether, disqualifying them as purely subjective. Another
strand of social history, however, led into the New Cultural History that anchors in
the ‘double reality’ of all things social, that is the objectively given web of structures,
institutions, social formations, and the subjectively “imagined communities” (Ander­
son 1983), in which the members of a society are living. This subjective dimension of
76 1 Theoretical Approaches

the social produced an interest in collective mentalities, identities, and the symbolic
worlds from which individuals and groups construct meaning in their lives, organize
perspectives on the world they live in, and negotiate their identity (Hunt 1989; Bonnell
and Hunt 1999; Burke 2004; Bachmann-Medick 2009).
In this context autobiography was reassessed as a source that could pave a path
into the history of meaning-making, the social construction of knowledge and the
formation of identity. Under the umbrella of the New Cultural History emerging in
the 1980s/1990s, historians more interested “in the attitudes and assumptions that
structure autobiographical authors’ writing than the factual claims they make about
their lives” (Popkin 2005, 19) have come to see autobiographical material as important
sources to answer these questions about the experience of historical change. In order
to understand “how people assume the identity that situates and motivates them in
relation to others”, writes Jo Burr Margadant, “it is necessary to grasp the symbolic
world from which they construct meaning in their lives” (Margadant 2000, 4). This
makes autobiographical texts a key source for processes of self-reflection, self-descrip­
tion, and identity formation.
In the wake of the cultural turn, historians began to read autobiographical mate­
rial to learn something about processes of socialization, focusing on childhood,
youth, and education as well as on deviant behavior and criminality. Other historians
used autobiographies as sources for body history, the history of sexuality, and the
negotiation of gender ideals. Furthermore, many studies investigating the history of
religion and piety used autobiographical material, just as scholars reconstructing the
history of science and technology did (Depkat 2010). Among the most recent trends in
social and cultural history is memory studies that draws on autobiographical material
to reconstruct the formation, transformation, and handing down of collective memory.
This recent interest in the construction of historical memory through autobiography
is both new and old at the same time because the idea of historiography and autobi­
ography being “two ways of narrating and preserving the past” (Popkin 2005, 4) was
already discussed by scholars like Wilhelm Dilthey, for whom autobiography was the
root of all historical thinking (Dilthey 1981, 247), or Paul Ricoeur, who in Temps et
récit [Time and Narrative] reflected broadly about narrative identity and its relation to
historical narrative (Popkin 2005, 43–50).
Despite the long standing and widespread use of autobiography as a histori­
cal source, historians consider it to be dubious material at best. In terms of factual
information about past events, autobiographies frequently contain nothing that is
not already known from other sources, so that the question of the ‘added value’ of
studying autobiographical material becomes virulent. Even more important is the
problem of reliability. G. Kitson Clark, author of a widely used introduction to the
study of history for students, sees autobiography as the “least convincing of all per­
sonal records” (Clark 1967, 67), and the German historian Winfried Baumgart, editor of
the most recent standard manual on the study of sources, urges historians to confront
autobiographical material with professional distrust from the start (Baumgart 1991, 2).
 1.8 History 77

At the same time, he is willing to grant greater credibility to diaries and letters because
their perspective on historical reality is supposedly less marred by later knowledge
and experiences than the one of autobiographies (Baumgart 1991, 2–3). While his­
torians are willing to see unpublished autobiographical texts as more credible than
those written for publication (Henning 2012, 39), they are generally uneasy with all
forms of first-person narratives because their subjectivity seems to stand in the way of
themselves and the past as it actually was.
Interested in factual accuracy and historical objectivity, historians are skeptical
about having to see past realities through the limited, arbitrary, and biased perspec­
tive of the autobiographer’s eye. How the autobiographer experienced history, and
what he or she writes about it, they would claim, depends on his or her upbring­
ing, education, and profession, his or her regional background as well as his or her
political and ideological orientation. Other factors determining an autobiographer’s
perspective on his or her time are gender, class, ethnicity, and profession, and to this
we must add the arbitrariness of an autobiographer’s lifespan plus other idiosyncra­
cies of individual lives. Apart from stressing the limitations of an autobiographer’s
perspective, historians have pointed out that autobiographies are written with the
wisdom of hindsight and, therefore, have to be addressed as after-the-fact rational­
izations serving purposes of self-promotion, self-legitimation, self-justification, or
the denial of guilt. Many autobiographers have been identified as narcissists, who
let their contributions and historical significance appear much greater than it actu­
ally was. Most importantly, however, an autobiographer’s narrative representation of
the past is always selective; there are things that he or she writes about, while other
things, purposely or not, are left unmentioned. Finally, there is the problem of lying
in autobiography, whose narrative is formed by the dialectic of revelation and with­
holding, unveiling and veiling, truth-telling and lying (Popkin 2005, 11–24; Depkat
2003, 447–453).
An autobiographical narrative, therefore, is not a disinterested representation of
the past as it actually was, including the feelings, thoughts, motivations, and purposes
of the autobiographer. Rather, from a historian’s perspective it is an interest-driven
reconstruction of the past from the perspective of the writing present that represents
past events in a way in which they could not have been presented at the moment they
were experienced. In addition, the autobiographical narrative is carried by the con­
scious or unconscious tendency to introduce coherence and meaning into the author’s
life that the author was not aware of at the time he or she is writing about. The unique
access to the subjective dimensions of history that autobiographical material promises
to offer is problematic because the autobiographer’s experience of history as it mani­
fests itself in his or her inner thoughts, motivations, perceptions, and feelings during
specific moments in the past is inherently unverifiable on the basis of other sources.
Historians, therefore, always have to decide whether they want to believe what an
autobiographer tells them about the past or not, and when push comes to shove, his­
torians tend to distrust the autobiographer.
78 1 Theoretical Approaches

This professional distrust, not only in autobiography but in all first-person nar­
ratives, is the consequence of historiography becoming ‘scientific’ in the course of
the nineteenth century. Maintaining that objectivity was the opposite of subjectivity,
the ‘scientific turn’ in historiography rendered “historical subjectivity generally […]
obscure as part of the attempt to be objective” (Crane 2006, 434). Demanding that the
scholarly historian extract verifiable knowledge from historical material by way of
rigorous source criticism in the search of historical ‘truth’, the formation of a new pro­
fessional identity as history scholars let all forms of self-referential narrative become
suspected of being pure fiction. This distinction between objectivity and subjectivity
made historians prefer administrative records and historical documents as the more
reliable sources, while all forms of self-referential writing were understood as mani­
festations of a subjectivity that fell from the historian’s radar screen (Popkin 2005, 16;
Crane 2006, 435).
In all, therefore, historiography’s ‘scientific turn’, which was reinforced by
the form of social history anchoring in statistical evidence and empirical data that
emerged in the 1960s/1970s, went hand in hand with a separation of historiography
from literature, including autobiography. With the “wall between history and autobi­
ography” having been constructed “largely from the historians’ side” (Popkin 2005,
15), historians lost their intellectual equipment to treat autobiographies as textual
sources adequately, reading them literally, and judging them solely in terms of their
factual accuracy.
Under the auspices of the New Cultural History, feeding on feminist, poststruc­
turalist, anthropological, and phenomenological approaches, the formerly cemented
distinction between objectivity and subjectivity has begun to crumble. A new aware­
ness that all knowledge is socially constructed, and that subjectivity and objectivity,
therefore, are related and not opposed, has emerged since roughly the 1990s to the
effect that historians increasingly have stressed the performativity, positionality and
relationality of all historical knowledge. This also has far reaching consequences for
the treatment of life writing in general as it suggests that historians dealing with auto­
biographical material should move their discussion beyond the antinomy of truth
versus fiction (Popkin 2005, 33).
More recent studies have tried to confront the hybridity of the genre oscillat­
ing between fact and fiction. Scholars like Jeremy D. Popkin, Jo Burr Margadant,
Dagmar Günther, or Volker Depkat have integrated narratological and communicative
approaches to reassess the source value of autobiography (Günther 2001; Margadant
2000; Popkin 2005; Depkat 2003). This has led some historians to deal with genre
conventions, narrative patterns and strategies in autobiographical material, while
others have been more interested in identifying the intertextual relationships of an
individual autobiography with other texts. Again others endeavored to embed autobi­
ographical texts into the larger discursive contexts of a time, the effect of this being,
of course, the de-centering of a personal document, the deconstruction of its claim to
subjective authenticity, and the dissolution of the individual into the collective.
 1.8 History 79

Next to this interest in the narrativity of autobiography, its communicative prag­

matics as acts of social communication is currently attracting a lot of attention. Auto­
biography has been discovered by historians as a social practice that serves a limited
number of identifiable communicative functions in a given communicative context
that both supersedes and envelopes the text itself. As such acts of social communica­
tion, autobiographies are triggered by concrete biographical and historical contexts
that can be identified and reconstructed, which is why the biographical and historical
moment of the autobiographical act has become crucial for historians to investigate
(Depkat 2007; Preusser and Schmitz 2010; Lahusen 2014).
While historians have developed a new curiosity about the narrativity and com­
municative pragmatics of autobiography, they continue to see them as historical
sources paving a path into the extra-textual historical contexts. Historians, therefore,
read self life writing as texts to use as evidence for a broad variety of questions relat-
ing to the past. Autobiography has been reassessed as a mode of narrative self-discov­
ery and self-creation, as a medium of social self-description, and as an act of meaning­
making in the light of experienced historical change. In short, historians have begun
to analyze the what and how of autobiographical narration in its dependence on the
when and why, making the textuality of autobiography the new point of departure
for their source criticism. This suggests a very close reading of autobiographical texts
to analyze how the narrator organizes the communication with his or her imagined
audience and how the extra-textual communicative context shapes the textual profile
of an autobiographical narrative. The uses, functions, and historical moments of auto­
biography build bridges from the textuality of autobiography into the biographical
and historical context of an autobiographical act, and only this allows historians to
treat autobiography as sources for the history of identity, subjectivity, and processes
of meaning-making. This opens up new possibilities of interdisciplinary dialogue
between historians and literary critics.
Still, historians refrain from divorcing the literary narrative completely from
reality and continue to insist that the relationship between narrative identity and the
lived life is not fully arbitrary. David Carr has raised the question of whether the expe­
rience of life itself has a narrative structure built into it. Carr sees a lived life “as a
constant effort, even a struggle, to maintain or restore narrative coherence in the face
of an ever-threatening, impending chaos at all levels” because only this is the basis for
acting meaningfully in a given present and with respect to an anticipated future (Carr
1986, 91; see also Popkin 2005, 52–53). Carr, therefore, suggests that human beings
are constantly making sense of experiences by giving them a narrative form already
while they are living the life they write about in autobiography. Narrative, therefore,
is a basic cultural practice of “being in and dealing with time” (Carr 1986, 185), so that
autobiography cannot be reduced to just its textuality and treated as another form of
novel writing. It may, indeed, be the root of all historical understanding and meaning-
making. This turns autobiography in and by itself into both a historical fact and a
historical (communicative) event that can be analyzed in terms of cause and effect.
80 1 Theoretical Approaches

It is not just about the facts behind the text; it is about the factuality of the autobio­
graphical text itself.

Works Cited
Ambrosius, Lloyd E., ed. Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso, 1983.
Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek:
Rowohlt, 3rd ed. 2009 [Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/Boston:
de Gruyter, 2016].
Baumgart, Winfried, ed. Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus und des Ersten Weltkrieges (1871–1918):
Zweiter Teil: Persönliche Quellen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed.
1991.
Bonnell, Victoria E., and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of
Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Burke, Peter. What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Clark, G. Kitson. The Critical Historian. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Crane, Susan A. “(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History and Collec-
tive Memory with Hans von Aufsess.” History & Memory 8.1 (1996): 5–29.
Crane, Susan A. “Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay.” Journal of Modern History 78.2 (2006):
434–456.
Depkat, Volker. “Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit.” Geschichte und
Gesellschaft 29.3 (2003): 441–476.
Depkat, Volker. Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden. Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des
20. Jahrhunderts. München: Oldenbourg, 2007.
Depkat, Volker. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der
Geschichts­wissenschaft.” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebens-
verlaufsanalysen 23.2 (2010): 170–187.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften: Einleitung
von Manfred Riedel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [The Formation of the Historical World in
the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002].
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994.
Günther, Dagmar. “‘And now for something completely different’. Prolegomena zur Autobiographie
als Quelle der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Historische Zeitschrift 272.1 (2001): 25–61.
Henning, Eckart. Selbstzeugnisse: Quellenwert und Quellenkritik. Berlin: BibSpider, 2012.
Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds. Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David
Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Iggers, Georg G. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical
Thought from Herder to the Present. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968.
Klein, Christian, ed. Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien. Stuttgart: Metzler,
2009.
 1.8 History 81

Lahusen, Christiane. Zukunft am Ende. Autobiographische Sinnstiftungen von DDR-Geisteswissen-

schaftlern nach 1989. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014.
Leckie, Shirley A. “Biography Matters: Why Historians Need Well-Crafted Biographies More Than
Ever.” Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. Ed. Lloyd E Ambrosius. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2004. 1–26.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 13–46 [“The autobio-
graphical pact.” On Autobiography. Es. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30].
Margadant, Jo Burr, ed. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I, part 1. Frankfurt a. M.:
Schulte-Bulmke, 3rd ed. 1949 [History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I], part 1. Trans.
E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950].
Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang: Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a. M.:
Athenäum, 1970.
Popkin, Jeremy D. “Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier.” American Historical Review 104.3
(June 1999): 725–748.
Popkin, Jeremy D. History, Historians and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
Preusser, Heinz-Peter, and Helmut Schmitz, eds. Autobiografie und historische Krisenerfahrung.
Heidelberg: Winter, 2010.
Ranke, Leopold von. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514
(1824). Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. XXXIII/XXXIV. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1874.
Runyan, William. Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010.
Ulbrich, Claudia, Hans Medick, and Angelika Schaser, eds. Selbstzeugnis und Person: Transkultu­
relle Perspektiven. Köln: Böhlau, 2012.

Further Reading
Brodzki, Bella, and Celeste Marguerite Schenck, eds. Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Depkat, Volker. “The Challenges of Biography. European-American Reflections.” Bulletin of the
German Historical Institute 55 (Fall 2014): 39–48.
Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Essais d’ego-histoire: Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul
­Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, Rene Remond. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
Rak, Julie. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.” Genre: Forms
of Discourse and Culture 37.3–4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 483–504.
Redlich, Fritz. “Autobiographies as Sources for Social History. A Research Program.” Vierteljahres­
schrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 62 (1975): 380–390.
1.9 History of Art
Gerd Blum

Since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (Florence 1568; first edition 1550), ‘master-
pieces’ of the visual arts, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, have frequently
been interpreted autobiographically. Such interpretations are to be found in early
modern and modern art historiography (‘History of Art’): initially in early modern
‘Kunstliteratur’ [literature on art and artists] by professional artists and later (until
ca. 1900) in scholarly literature by professional ‘Historians of Art’. From the beginning
of the early modern period onwards, autobiographical exegesis has been applied not
only to explicitly autobiographical drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints, but
also to many works that do not have obvious autobiographical content, i. e. to images
that are neither self-portraits nor open allusions to the artist’s life or career.
Art historical research became a university discipline shortly after 1800. Through­
out the nineteenth century scholarly art historians cited, but rejected, early modern
autobiographical interpretations of artworks, which were based mainly on anecdotes
and legends derived from ‘Kunstliteratur’ and collections of biographies of artists that
were published frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth century after the model
of Vasari’s collection of “lives” by van Mander, Bellori, Baldinucci, and others (von
Schlosser 1924; Blum 2012). At the same time these art historians implicitly trans­
mitted autobiographical interpretations by transferring to the visual arts the poetic
theory of the pre-romantic ‘Sturm und Drang’ [Storm and Stress] movement, in which
a work was the expression of the genius and the personality of the creator. It was not
until formalist and iconographical methods of analyzing artworks within a history of
‘style’ (Wölfflin 1888 and 1915) or within a ‘history of ideas’ (Panofsky 1924 and 1955;
Warburg 1893) became canonical that autobiographical interpretation was excluded
as an exegetical tool.
The new academic discipline of ‘History of Art’ was first institutionalized in
Germany at Göttingen University in 1813 and then in Bonn in 1847 (Rosenberg 1995,
312). Paradoxically, the advocates of this discipline argued against autobiographical
interpretations at the very moment that they developed the modern monograph on
the artist’s ‘Life and Work’ (on the latter: Guercio 2006). The life-and-work genre was
first established for the “Absolute Artist” (Soussloff 1997) of modern Europe before ca.
1870, i. e. for Raphael of Urbino (Raffaelo Sanzio [1483–1520]). In 1815 Johann Heinrich
Füssli published his lecture on the “Life and Works of Raphael” (Füssli 1815). Exten­
sive monographs on the life and work of Raphael by Quatremère de Quincy (1824),
Rumohr (1831), Müntz (1881), Passavant (1839–1847), and Crowe and Cavalcaselle
(1883) soon followed (see Hellwig 2005 and Heß et al. 2012).
The authors of these monographs on the ‘life and work’ of the western artist-ge­
nius explicitly rejected the anecdotal approaches and the hyperbolic tropes of the
early modern collections of artists’ lives. The authors of this new genre went to the

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-010
 1.9 History of Art 83

historical archives, corrected Vasari’s factual ‘errors’ with philological acumen, added
a scholarly apparatus of sources and a ‘catalogue raisonné’ (Roesler-Friedenthal 2013)
of the entire body of works by the master’s ‘own hand’ to their chronological narrative
of the artist’s life, oeuvre, and career.
In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries autobiographical
interpretation was extended to any drawing, painting, and sculpture by a single artist.
These images were seen to result from his or her life. Autobiographical interpretation
was not applied to acheiropoietical images of supposed supranatural origins [i. e.
icons ‘made without hands’], or to depictions made by anonymous craftsmen. An
artwork may either be considered – in a narrow sense of ‘autobiographical’ – a more
or less explicit result and testimony of an occurrence in the life of an artist or as a
‘confession’ of the inner self, turning the artwork into an element of a “diary” (as
Picasso famously put it [see Gilot and Lake 1965, 123; Krauss 1981]). From the time of
Paolo Giovio and Giorgio Vasari, works of the visual arts have often been regarded
as the result of personality and character (Price Zimmermann 1995; Enenkel 2013;
Graul 2015) or as an individual response to a moment in the artist’s life and “Wirklich­
keit” [‘reality’] and thus in this wider sense it is ‘autobiographical’ (Eckermann 1836,
“18. September 1823”).

Literature on Art and Art Criticism from Antiquity

In the surviving fragments and rudiments of ancient treatises on the visual arts (Settis
1993) the work of art is neither conceptualized as a testimony of an event within the
life of an artist nor of his inner ‘self’. This applies also to the only surviving, ancient
‘theoretical’ treatise on one of the modern ‘sister arts’ which survived, i. e. in Vitruvi­
us’s handbook on architecture, written ca. 22 CE (Vitruvius 1999; on autobiograph­
ical aspects of architecture see Pisani and Oy-Marra 2014; Forster 2014). The most
important and most influential testimonies on ancient artists and art are 1) the short
‘micro-biographies’ of and anecdotes on artists by Pliny the Younger (Blake McHam
2013), and 2) the ‘Ekphraseis’ (descriptions of art works) by the so-called Philostratos
the Younger, by Lukian and others (Arnulf 2003). Autobiographical exegeses of art­
works are rare in both genres of the ancient literature of art, but one famous example
is Lukian’s description of the lost Calumny of Apelles. Lukian ascribed the painting
to Apelles himself, who was the court-artist to Alexander the Great, and offered an
autobiographical interpretation of this panel. According to Lukian its painter, Apelles,
depicted himself as the protagonist (Agnolotto 2005). This lost painting was recreated
by Botticelli and other early modern painters and woodcutters. According to various
ancient sources, the Amazonomachia on the shield of Phidias’s Athena Parthenos in
the Parthenon at Athens contained a self-portrait of its author as its centerpiece (DNO,
vol. II, nos. 900, 904, 910–912). Pliny the Elder and others explained the excellence of
84 1 Theoretical Approaches

paintings by Parrhasios and Zeuxis – along with Apelles the most famous painters of
Antiquity – as a result of occurrences and decisions in the artist’s lives. In Parrhasios’s
dreams, Hermes appears in a pose fit for portrayal (DNO, vol. II, no. 1648), and Zeuxis
dares to ask the burghers of Croton to present him their daughters as nude models for
an image of a single ‘model’ of ideal beauty (DNO, vol. II, nos. 1733–1737). This ficti­
tious episode has often been rendered by early modern artists as if it were a real event
in Zeuxis’ life and these depictions often contained a self-portrait of the modern artist
himself (e. g. Giorgio Vasari’s frescoe in the Sala grande of his house in Florence, ca.
1569–1572 [see Blum 2011, 245–246]).
The most important literary genre of autobiographical exegesis extant from
ancient times is the ‘artist-anecdote’. Often far from being authentic and of factual
documentary value, some of the famous and highly influential anecdotes on artists in
Pliny the Elder’s chapters on the History of Art within his encyclopedic Naturalis his-
toria (written around 1477; editio princeps 1469: Blake McHam 2013, 147–153) construct
autobiographical moments to explain content and style of famous works of art (Kris
and Kurz 1934). Mary Rosenthal Lefkowitz (1981) showed similar modes of crafting
the ‘life’ of a poet according to his work – reminding one of Paul de Man’s famous
questions in his article, “Autobiography as De-facement”:

But are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its
subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an
act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiograph­
ical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact
governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by
the resources of his medium? (de Man 1979, 920)

The Middle Ages and Early Modernism

The widely-held Romantic concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ was that of an epoch lacking
the concept of individuality, which had not yet been discovered or invented (Burck­
hardt 1860, 201–209). In reality medieval artisans and patrons used inscriptions to
mark and memorialise their authorship, often in astonishingly self-confident ways
(Legner 2009; Dietl 2009). While in medieval treatises and texts on the visual arts no
autobiographical exegesis has been documented, nevertheless protagonists in high
medieval epics sometimes depict their own biography and thus create a form of fic­
titious autobiographical art. (On the so called Prose-Lancelot and other literary texts
see Wandhoff 2003, 271–323.)
The Tuscan proverb “Ogni artista dipinge se stesso” [‘Every artists depicts
himself’], first documented 1478, is widely misunderstood as early modern praise of
individualism (Zöllner 2002, 113–117). In a famous paragraph of Leonardo’s posthu­
mously edited written work, called the Trattato, Leonardo’s variation of this dictum
suggests that every artist in all of his depictions of human figures and faces invol­
 1.9 History of Art 85

untarily depicts his own likeness. His claim was that the mistake of self-depiction
could be avoided by thorough studies of diverse models (Leonardo 1882, § 108). Vasari,
however, sees the styles of individual artists as rooted in their personalities and char­
acters. For Vasari, the paintings of Andrea Castagno – a fifteenth century contempo­
rary of the pious and gentle painter Fra Angelico – are rude and aggressive in style,
due to his rude and aggressive manners and character. The style is evident regardless
of the respective subject matter, which would usually have been dictated by patrons
(Vasari 1966–1988, vol. III, 351–365; Graul 2015). For Vasari, on the other hand, Fra
Angelico’s (and Raphael’s) works are full of grace and beauty because of the sweet,
saintly and sociable manners and characters of their creators (Vasari 1966–1988,
vol. III, 269–283 and vol. IV, 155–217).

Ca. 1800 to ca. 1910

There is no history of the rise and decline of the autobiographical exegesis of works of
art. But after ca. 1750, the ‘Sturm und Drang’ concept of the poet as ‘génie’ (Sommer
1998 [1942]), ‘Genie’ (Schmidt 1985), or ‘genius’ (Panofsky 1962; Murray 1989) was
more and more applied to painters and sculptors. This gave the rich biographical and
anecdotical material, which was collected (and invented) in the early modern col­
lections of artists’ lives a new significance. Every moment of an artist’s life could be
interpreted as an expression of the outstanding nature and experiences of the ‘ingen­
ious’ artist. Popular genres, such as ‘guidebooks’, ‘artist-novellas’, and the new schol­
arly genre of the ‘artist monograph’, are testimonies to the widespread practice of
autobiographical interpretations of artworks during the Enlightenment and Romantic
periods. The sculptor Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, written around 1557–1566,
was not published until 1728 and was then translated and edited by Goethe. However
the first autobiography of an artist ever printed is Vasari’s autobiography (as the final
piece of the second edition of his Lives: Vasari 1568, vol. III, 980–1002).
Around 1800, a new genre of ‘paintings on painting and painters’ emerged: Paint­
ings and prints showed a painter or artist, for example Raphael of Urbino, creating
artworks in an obviously private, ‘biographical’ moment, thus showing his master­
works to be results of an autobiographical constellation (see for example Jean-Au­
guste Dominique Ingres’s painting Raphael and the Fornarina, Cambridge, Harvard
Art Museums, 1814; Riepenhausen 1820; Riepenhausen 1833; for more examples see
Thimann and Hübner 2015).
In texts, whose authors were reaching out to a wider public beyond the academic
world, works of the Italian Renaissance, for example, were interpreted as autobio­
graphical testimonies. Today, Giorgione’s Tempest (Venice, Accademia), is con­
sidered to be a highly sophisticated allegory on the inspiration of the poet (Frings
1999) or an enigmatic depiction of Adam and Eve after the Fall (Settis 1978). In the
86 1 Theoretical Approaches

nineteenth century it was frequently interpreted as an autobiographical “Bekennt­

nis” [‘confession’] (Reinhart 1866, 252). It was seen as a depiction of the “Family of
Giorgione” (Reinhart 1866, 252; Crowe and Cavasvaselle 1876, 175), which was a title
which the painting obtained due to a misunderstanding of Byron’s Beppo (Ander­
son 1994). According to Raphael’s nineteenth century biographers (named above),
an altarpiece by Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, depicted his son as a ‘Wunderkind’
[infant prodigy] at work. Raphael’s portrait of a young woman, the so-called Forna-
rina (Rome, Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Moderna, ca. 1518) was seen as a portrait of
his mistress (the same applied to his Donna Velata in Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria
Palatina, ca. 1515/1516). Works by northern artists, too, were also interpreted as if they
were precise documents of autobiographical events and circumstances, for example,
works by Rembrandt (Stückelberger 1996; Müller 2009) and Vermeer’s paintings,
newly ‘discovered’, after 1860 (Thoré-Bürger 1866; Büttner 2014).
The classical nineteenth century monographs on Raphael, Michelangelo, Rem­
brandt and other ‘divine’ artists and geniuses denounced earlier, pre-scholarly auto­
biographical exegeses of their works but, at the same time, succeeded in transmitting
analyses of precisely this type.

Modern ‘Art History’: The Decline of Academic

Autobiographical Exegesis and the Retrospective
Analysis of its Topoi
Since Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s claim to have advanced beyond a pre-modern
‘history of artists’ to a modern, theory-informed ‘history of art’ (“Geschichte der Kün­
stler” vs. “Geschichte der Kunst” [Winckelmann 1764, 9]), autobiographical exege­
sis has not been considered to be a reliable form of scholarship. Despite this, it has
remained widespread and popular. While Winckelmann had opted for a history and
theory of a hypostatized ‘Art’, Jacob Burckhardt saw the work of art as an expression
of a particular ‘Culture’, rather than as a hidden autobiographical document (Burck­
hardt 1860). Philological research by ‘positivistic’ scholars like Passavant, Müntz, and
others showed the absence of historical sources and archival documents for most pre­
vious autobiographical interpretations of masterworks of the canon.
Within the first decades of the formation of scholarly ‘Art History’, artists began
to write accounts of their own lives and works, often containing autobiographical
interpretations of their works: For example, there were manifestos (at first the Realist
Manifesto by Courbet 1855 [see Courbet 2011, 34–36]); diaries (Delacroix 1950); letters
(Cézanne 2013; von Marées 1987; van Gogh 2009) and written records of conversa­
tions with artists by admirers and pupils (Doran 1978). Formalist art history, such
as Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen” [‘Art History without Names’]
 1.9 History of Art 87

(Wölfflin 1915, 20; see also Zimmermann 2009, 133) was greatly influenced by Édouard
Manet’s friend Emile Zola and Hans von Marées’s friends and ‘pupils’ Konrad Fiedler
and Adolf von Hildebrand. Zola, Fiedler, and Hildebrand denied any autobiographical
content even of those paintings which were obviously autobiographical works (Blum
2001, 2005). As well as the ‘iconographic’ method (Panofsky 1924, 1955; Warburg 1893)
formalist art history did not deal with art as an expression of an individual artist or
as autobiographical testimony. These approaches define a work of the visual arts
either as a realization of a supra-individual history of ‘form’ or as an expression of the
‘History of Ideas’.
As a consequence of this marginalization of autobiographical interpretations
within twentieth century academic historiography of art, contributions to an auto­
biographical understanding were provided, strikingly, from outside the discipline.
Sigmund Freud offered an autobiographical exegesis of Leonardo’s The Virgin and
Child with Saint Anne (Paris, Louvre, ca. 1503–1519). He applied his psychoanalyti­
cal theory of dreams to this image by using a letter by Leonardo in which Leonardo
describes a dream from his childhood (Freud 1910). Sociologist Georg Simmel inter­
preted Rembrandt’s late self-portraits as a condensed summation of his whole biog­
raphy (Simmel 1916). Freud’s pupil Ernst Kris and his co-author Otto Kurz showed
the link between the seemingly factual biographical information provided in Early
Modern Artists’ ‘lives’ and the artists’ works (Kris and Kurz 1934; for a history of these
topoi and “Legends of the Artist” up to the second half of the twentieth century, see
Soussloff 1997).
Openly autobiographical paintings were created in large numbers and exhibited
from 1850 onwards, first by Gustave Courbet (Marchal 2012) and soon followed by
Edouard Manet, Hans von Marées, and Paul Cézanne. It was a full hundred years
before the autobiographical character of the paintings by these ‘founders’ of Modern­
ism were subject to scholarly analysis. This was first done in Kurt Badt’s ground-break­
ing book on Paul Cézanne and his autobiographical motives (Badt 1960). Badt related
Cézanne’s famous series of the Card Players and the Bathers to an early autobiograph­
ical drawing. Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (exh. 1863, Blum 2001) and other
early paintings by this “painter of Modern Life” (Baudelaire 1964 [1863]) were ana­
lyzed as autobiographical allegories (Mauner 1975; Locke 2001). Contemporary painter
Hans von Marées’s drawings and paintings are often explicitly autobiographical (Lenz
1987; Blum 2005). Avantgarde and early Modernist artists frequently provided auto­
biographical discourses about their artworks (during the pre- and post-World War I
periods) (Thürlemann 1981).
88 1 Theoretical Approaches

Autobiographical Comments and Interpretations of

Contemporary Art after the “Death of the Author”
After Roland Barthes’s article on “The Death of the Author” (1967), discourses by artists
on the autobiographical contents of their own works and artistic self-representations
were less and less seen as reliable testimonies regarding the artist’s ‘true’ life and
intentions. Rather, they were seen as deliberate ‘self-fashioning’ (referring to Green­
blatt 1980: Woods-Marsden 1998). Despite a scholarly reaction against the ‘intentional
fallacy’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954), the autobiographical exegesis of contemporary
art works by artists and critics bloomed both in postwar Paris and New York. Surreal­
ists and postwar artists of the ‘Informel’ such as André Masson and Wols (i. e. Alfred
Otto Wolfgang Schulze) considered art an immediate expression of the artist’s inner
self via Surrealism-inspired “écriture automatique” [‘automatic writing’] (Breton 1924,
37; Masson 2005). An important spokesman for the ‘New York School’, painter Barnett
Newman, declared in 1965: “The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject of
painting” (Newman 1990, 187). Newman did not intend his non-figurative paintings to
be expressions of his own personality and autobiography, but intended to evoke the
beholder’s awareness of his or her “self” (Newman 1992, 187). So, the experience of his
huge paintings is intended as a “sublime” experience of the viewer himself (Newman
1992, 170–174 [1948]; Rothko 1999 [1943])
Despite Barthes’s dictum, from the 1960s on, artists created and published auto­
biographical narratives to establish a public understanding of their works as being
deeply autobiographical and authentic. For example, in many interviews, Louise
Bourgeois spoke frankly about her childhood and youth and fostered an autobio­
graphical interpretation of her sculptures and drawings (Bourgeois 1998). A more
extreme case is that of Joseph Beuys. In his so called Lebenslauf/Werklauf [Life
Course/Work Course] (begun 1961) and in conversations with his semi-official biogra­
phers, Beuys created an entire autobiography that was wholly contra-factual, but not
revealed to be a fiction until 1980 (Buchloh 2000 [1980]). Nevertheless these myths
had exerted considerable influence on the autobiographical exegesis of his works and
public art performances (Gieseke 1996; Riegel 2013; Schoene forthcoming). The influ­
ential curator Harald Szeemann devoted his seminal Exhibition documenta 5 (Kassel,
Germany, 1972) to ‘individual mythologies’ (Szeemann 1985) by contemporary artists,
which were highly loaded with autobiographical allusions. Carl Einstein wrote earlier
about “private mythologies” (Einstein 1996 [1926], 112).
Contemporary advocates of autobiographical exegesis, both in scholarly Art
History and in Art Criticism, operate with the principle that openly autobiographical
art does not reveal the artist’s ‘true’ self, but deliberately fashions an images of her
or his public persona (De Man 1979; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 39–81; Woods-Marsden
1998). Since the 1970s artistic practice and art performances by Marina Abramovič
(Abramovič 2010; on her autobiographical myths Janhsen 2015, esp. 324n55), Sophie
 1.9 History of Art 89

Calle, Felix Gonzales-Torres (Smith 1996), Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, Cindy Sherman,
and others have been explicitly autobiographical and at the same time often accom­
panied by autobiographical paratexts and exegeses by the artists themselves (Höv­
elmeyer 2011; Stegmayer 2015). Autobiographical exegesis remains an important
approach to art, though a canonical, scholarly and accepted methodology guiding its
application to specific drawings, paintings, and sculptures is still lacking. Trying to
understand a work of art by making assumptions about the artist’s intentions or by
interpreting it as a direct expression of a biographical event, reduces the multi-layered
meaning of an artwork. On the other hand, the successful transformation of private
feelings and intimate thoughts into widely acclaimed ‘masterworks’ of art should be
analyzed as a paradigmatic success in the mediation between the individual and pos­
terity.

Translation: Brigitte Kalthoff, Celia and David Bloor

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Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der
neueren Kunst. München: Bruckmann, 1915.
Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture. The Visual Construction of Identity and the
Social Status of the Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Zimmermann, Anja. Ästhetik der Objektivität: Genese und Funktion eines wissenschaftlichen und
künstlerischen Stils im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.
Zöllner, Frank. Michelangelos Fresken in der Sixtinischen Kapelle – gesehen von Giorgio Vasari und
Ascanio Condivi. Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2002.

Further Reading
Kemp, Martin. “The ‘Super-artist’ as Genius. The Sixteenth-century View.” Genius. The History of an
Idea. Ed. Penelope Murray. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 32–53.
Schwarz, Michael Viktor. “Figure of Memory and Figure of the Past. Giotto’s Double Life – With
a Side-Glance at Joseph Beuys.” Studies of Art History 46: The Challenges of Biographical
Research in Art History of Today. Helsinki: The Society for Art and Art History in Finland, 2013.
14–23.
Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Most Exellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Ed. Philip Jacks.
New York: The Modern Library, 2006.
Winner, Matthias, ed. Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk (Internationales Symposium der Biblio-
theca Hertziana, Rom 1989). Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1992. 161–191.
Zilsel, Edgar. Die Geniereligion. Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal mit
einer historischen Begründung (1918). Ed. Johann Dvořak. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990.
Zilsel, Edgar. Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des
Frühkapitalismus. Tübingen: Mohr, 1926.
1.10 Media Studies
Matthias Christen

Media have been gaining salience within the critical discourse on autobiography since
the 1970s, in the guise of individual visual and audiovisual media, of film and pho­
tography in particular. They did so in the form of separate technological and aesthetic
artifacts, as ‘mediums’, rather than in terms of mediality in general and media as a
collective singular that signifies “the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental
condition, for experience and understanding” (as to the distinction between mediums
and media see Mitchell and Hansen 2010, vii). As an issue of generic criticism, media
have thus initially been largely confined to individual disciplines, to film studies
(Sitney 1978), literary studies (Bruss 1980), or photo history (Mora 2004a [1983], 2004b
[1999]).
Not until the early 2000s did the different lineages begin to merge into a more
comprehensive approach anchored in media studies proper. As it has been the case
with its development into an academic discipline of its own, media studies contrib­
utes to the criticism of autobiography not by simply supplanting extant concepts. As
a discipline it rather provides a common theoretical framework, acting as a facilitator
and intermediary as it has done so successfully in different areas of research. The late
advent of a media studies approach to autobiography can be put down to three reasons
in particular: Literature has a long-standing tradition of autobiographical texts that
reaches back as far as late Antiquity. Autobiographical films and photoautobiogra­
phies, in contrast, did grow into a conspicuous body of work no earlier than the 1960s
and 1970s with documentary and avant-garde filmmaking and the autobiographical
photobooks as its trailblazers. Compared to literary studies, media studies itself is still
a fairly new phenomenon. It has started its academic career “as a quasi-autonomous
enterprise” in the 1960s and 1970s “at or around that moment, when it becomes pos­
sible to speak of media in the singular – as something other and indeed more than
a simple accumulation of individual mediums” (Mitchell and Hansen 2010, x). And,
finally, while literary studies set the terms for the generic criticism of autobiography,
media were initially perceived as a challenge, if not an outright threat to the tenets of
autobiography (Bruss 1980), rather than as enabling new forms of life narratives in
their own right. Historically, media-related approaches toward autobiography follow
a trajectory from critical reluctance to the acknowledgement of mediality as elemental
to the concept of the autobiographical self and their auto-narratives. This process has
led – alongside the evolvement of new auto-narrative modes within the field under
research – to a reevaluation and a reassessment of key concepts of the pertinent genre
criticism, which has been a dominion of literary studies for the bigger part of the twen­
tieth century. Common parlance, too, has eventually begun to shift from ‘autobiogra­
phy’ toward critical neologisms such as ‘automediality’ and ‘autofiction’.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-011
 1.10 Media Studies 95

Media-related Critical Concepts

Media-related approaches to autobiography can be subdivided into first, those which
are grounded in literary studies, second, those originating from a particular disci­
pline or area of research focused on individual visual or audiovisual mediums (e. g.
film studies), and third, an integrated media-studies approach which does no longer
uphold the once crucial distinction between language and apparatic media and
instead treats language and images, be they still or moving, as instances of an over­
arching mediality. Even though this listing does not imply a temporal succession –
historically various critical concepts do coexist –, integrated approaches are more
recent, while those that pit literary texts as standard mode of auto-narration against
audiovisual media seem increasingly dated.

Literary Studies

The approaches that have emerged from within literary studies vary according to how
they relate literature as a text based mode of life-narrative to different media. In her
seminal essay “Eye for I” (1980), Elisabeth Bruss conceives filmic auto-narratives as a
challenge to the traditional tenets of literary genre criticism: the primordial oneness
of the authorial subject, the basic identity of author, narrator, and protagonist as well
as the concept of language as a neutral, transparent means to substantiate the claim
to bio-narrational coherence and authorial identity. According to Bruss, film – being
an apparatic medium – splits up the primordial oneness of the authorial self. The
camera, be it a film or a photo camera, intervenes between the subject who is taking
the picture and the object in front of the viewfinder. It disassociates the expression of
the former’s subjectivity from the personal identity with the latter. The medium techni­
cally subverts the seemingly firm authorial stance resulting in a lack of control that the
subject of autobiography exerts over their auto-narrative. Since camera based media
require an actual corporeal presence of sort in front of the registering device, the focus
and the range of the auto-narrative shifts from a diachronic coverage of a life past
towards an ongoing present-tense narration rather diaristic in nature. If past events
have not been covered in the first place, the lack of footage can hardly be made up
for. The author will have to resort to either footage originating from different sources
(images taken by parents, relatives, or friends) or to a different system of signs (text
inserts, voice-over commentaries). Either way, autobiographical films and photoauto­
biographies inevitably turn out to be hybrid, multi-modal artifacts with their authors
sharing with others what Michael Renov calls “textual authority” (2004 f, 233). They
do so to a degree that has led Bruss to voice serious doubts whether there is an auto­
biographical film at all. As an apparatic medium, film, and photography by extension,
seems unfit to come up with any “real […] equivalent to autobiography” (Bruss 1980,
296).
96 1 Theoretical Approaches

While Bruss obviously allocates ‘autobiography’ as a critical term to literature and

opposes the latter as a historically dominant mode of auto-narration to (audiovisual)
media, Kentaro Kawashima (2011) opts for a less exclusive approach, which, though
equally rooted in literary studies, takes into consideration both literature and media.
Kawashima does not share Bruss’ qualms over the advent of technical media putting
an end to a century-old tradition of literary autobiography as a dominant mode of
self-expression. Kawashima, however, takes media, tied up in a mutual relation­
ship, to reflect back on the literary genre in their capacity as “historisches Apriori”
[‘historical apriori’] (Kawashima 2011, 9). Photography in particular, he argues, has
brought on a sea change in the history of autobiography. From a media-theoretical
perspective, he comprehends photography as a mnemonic storage device. Its techni­
cal precision and the truthfulness of its recordings relieve, according to Kawashima,
literary life-narratives of the identifying function that the autobiographical genre
has supposedly been consigned to through to the mid-nineteenth century. While not
strictly ending the history of autobiography as a literary genre, the advent of pho­
tography affects the makeup of individual autobiographical texts nonetheless. In the
wake of the media-historical and epistemological revolution that photography has
set in motion, autobiographies from the early twentieth century onward increasingly
stress the manifoldness of literary bio-narratives, the disparity and non-identity of
the authorial subject, as well as a textual aesthetics of fragmentation and dispersion
(“Zerstreuung” [Kawashima 2011, 26–34]).
While less strict in its take on the subject than Bruss (literature vs. media),
Kawashima’s inclusive approach, correlating literature and media, invites further
questions and criticism on its part: Why, one might ask, do the reverberations of the
said media-historical revolution surface in literary texts only decades later? What
exactly does Kawashima mean when speaking of ‘photography’: a media-theoretical
concept, an epistemological object, or rather a set of material images? The idea of
photography being a truthful, quasi-scientific medium, has, too, figured as only one
among many to shape its history and understanding and does not qualify as a timeless
ontological feature.
A third approach rooted in literary studies eschews these questions vastly by nar­
rowing down its focus to the issue of media in autobiographical literature. The focus
is almost exclusively on photography, be it as an immaterial object referred to in the
text to trigger the act of remembrance, or as actual pictures included into the auto-nar­
rative. It puts off media-ontological considerations in favor of historical inquiries into
the textual occurrence of photographic imagery. The focal point is readjusted accord­
ingly from photography per se towards individual photographs and their material con­
dition. In this vein, Susanne Blazejewski draws up a detailed typology of functional
strategies of putting to use photographic images within autobiography (2002, 109).
Rugg (1997) and Adams (2000) take the occurrence of photographs within auto-narra­
tive texts as a cue to reflect back onto the notion of autobiography and its history. At
first sight, photography, pegged as an indexical medium, seems to bolster the genre’s
 1.10 Media Studies 97

claim to referentiality and truthfulness. On closer inspection, however, Adams notes

that photography gains prominence within autobiography and its theory to the same
extent that their central tenets – the notion of a unified authorial self to whom the
genre supposedly has privileged access – disintegrate under the onset of Poststruc­
turalist criticism. Instead of photography and autobiography mutually subtending
their claim to referentiality and truthfulness, as Adams contends, “[b]oth media are
increasingly self-conscious, and combining them may intensify rather than reduce the
complexity and ambiguity of each taken separately” (2000, 11). Interestingly enough,
facing a time of intense crisis in the history of the genre, Adams no longer sets off lit­
erary autobiographies against photography, or film for that matter, but addresses both
of them in a telling terminological turn as ‘media’ on equal grounds.

Approaches Referring to Individual Mediums

While approaches located within literary studies take to conceive autobiography as

above all a literary genre, there is a divergent line of research on auto-narratives that
bypasses literature altogether and refers to individual technical mediums instead.
Film studies have historically been prevalent in this respect with avant-garde and doc­
umentary filmmaking as its material bases (Sitney 1978; Lane 2002; Renov 2004a–f;
Curtis 2006; Lebow 2012). Even though film studies are primarily concerned with
moving images, most of its findings apply to photography as well inasmuch as it,
too, is an apparatic, camera-based medium and a media-technological predecessor
of film at that. What within literary studies poses a threat to the traditional notion
of autobiography – the splitting up of the authorial self by means of an apparatic
medium – does qualify with respect to film and photography as a basic aesthetic trait
of a camera-based auto-narrational practice. This is why Bruss’ essay “Eye for I” –
even though critically turned against film – has been incremental for the attempt to
draw up a theory of autobiography predicated on (technical) media.
Other than language, film and photography know indeed of no proper visual
equivalent to the first person singular. Films and photographs grant the subject of
the auto-narrative a strong physical presence, but they sever, in turn, the expres­
sion of subjectivity from the assertion of identity. Studies in visual and audiovisual
media as autobiography are thus regularly concerned with the question of how film
and photography manage to attribute an auto-narrational discourse to a particular
enunciator and how, in a historical perspective, specific aesthetic traits have been
assigned the respective task. Critical inquiries thus invariably stress the quintessen­
tial hybridity that marks camera-based autobiographical discourses as well as their
authorship. Since images can hardly be attributed to a particular authorial stance
on their own, more recent studies such as the one by Montémont (2008) redirect the
attention toward the overarching “dispositif d’identification” [‘the dispositive of iden­
tification’] (2008, 46) within which the imagery acquires autobiographical currency.
98 1 Theoretical Approaches

Integrated Approaches Rooted in Media Studies

In the early 2000s, attempts are made to merge the different academic lineages and
critical concepts into an encompassing theory of autobiography for which media
studies provide a common conceptual framework (above all Dünne and Moser 2008a
as well as Renov 2004 f; Whitlock 2007; Lundby 2008; Lebow 2012; Hedberg et al. 2014).
These integrated approaches no longer pit literature as an art form based on language
against apparatic media, nor do they limit themselves to individual mediums. They
rather aim at the mediality that is elemental to any form of autobiographical self-ex­
pression regardless of the technical means and the semiotic systems that subtend the
individual auto-narrative.
These integrated approaches towards autobiography are historically preceded
and abetted by a convergence in the formation of theories that literary criticism and
media studies have gone through in the wake of Poststructuralism and the twin lin­
guistic and medial or mediatic turn (Münker 2009) which have awarded language and
media a transcendental status: Individuals cannot gain access to neither themselves
nor the world at large if not by resorting to media or language. As a result, both literary
criticism and media studies convene on a set of key concepts when dealing with auto­
biography: the artificiality of the authorial subject (Lejeune 1987, 9; Wagner-Egelhaaf
2013, 8, 12) and the irrefutable mediality of the latter’s self-expression (“la vision du
monde et l’expression du sujet sont intimement liées aux médias” [‘the worldview and
the expression of the subject are both intimately tied to media’] [Lejeune 1987, 9]; see
also Dünne and Moser 2008b, 12).
By consequence, media are no longer considered to be neutral tools at the dis­
posal of a pre-existing authorial subject (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 7). There is no
immediate expression to a primordial selfhood. The latter is mediated, that is depend­
ing on media. This applies, too, for any mode that autobiographical subjects chose
to make themselves heard or seen. In this conceptual framework shared by media
studies and literary criticism, language, too, no longer grants a privileged access to a
subject of undisputed selfhood which it used to assert alongside with the coherence
of the latter’s auto-narrative by means of the first person singular and its linguistic
inflections. Accordingly, recent notions of autobiography are ever less predicated on
language and language alone. Assigning language its own mediality (“Medialität der
Sprache” [‘mediality of language’]), Wagner-Egelhaaf marks language as one among
other media of autobiography (2005, 190). So, instead of highlighting differences in
aesthetic, semiotic, or technical terms, recent approaches point out the basic com­
monalities that the various forms of autobiographical narrative hold as mediated
modes of self-expression.
With literary criticism and media studies engaging in a productive dialogue (as
stipulated by Dünne and Moser 2008b, 12), autobiography is being reconceptualised
as a genre as well as a field of research. Media and media technologies, the making
of the authorial subject, as well as the different modes of auto-narration and the very
 1.10 Media Studies 99

notion of autobiography were increasingly understood to be mutually dependent

on each other. Neither part of this complex equation does hold sway over the other,
as Dünne and Moser argue in the programmatic opening to their co-edited volume
Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien [‘Automediality.
Subject Constitution in Writing, Image and New Media’] (2008). Neither do self-reli­
ant authorial subjects govern the media of a seemingly sovereign self-expression, nor
does, in reverse, the mediality of auto-narratives reduce selfhood to a technological
after-effect. Instead of advocating unilateral determinisms of sorts, Dünne and Moser
opt for “ein konstitutives Zusammenspiel von medialem Dispositiv, subjektiver Refle­
xion und praktischer Selbstbearbeitung” [‘a constitutive interplay between media
dispositives, the reflexion of subjectivity, and a practical (auto-narrational – M. Chr.)
self-fashioning’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 13).
The medial ‘technologies of the self’ are subject to change as Gillian Withlock has
pointed out in her aptly subtitled book Soft Weapons. Autobiography in Transit (2007),
just as are the other constituents of the generic interplay. The notion of autobiography
has to be renegotiated accordingly, as it is the case with the concomitant notion of the
self and the subject. With media, autobiography and the self as malleable entities,
the history of the genre cannot be written according to a preconceived teleological
pattern, eventually leading to the establishment a self-reliant, notably Western (and
possibly male) subject as favored by traditional concepts (Dünne and Moser 2008b,
14).
Considered from a media studies perspective, such as the one advocated by Dünne
and Moser, the contemporary field of autobiography and auto-narratives appears
altered in several aspects, and it has, too, been considerably expanded. So called
‘new’ – meaning ‘digital’ – media such as the personal computer or the mobile phone
have coupled registering and distribution as historically distinct capacities. This has
not only engendered new forms of auto-narrative discourse. It has facilitated low-
level access to largely self-sustaining networks of distribution to a growing number
of people. The personal web page, for instance, has “radically altered the culture of
autobiography in the late twentieth century“ (Renov 2004 f, 232), as Renov contends:
“the culture of autobiography, far from being extinguished, has in fact proliferated,
percolating down to the level of popular commercial culture” (2004 f, 236).
With new, easily accessible means of distributing auto-narratives in place, book
publishers just as film distributors and cinemas lose part of the relevance and impact
they used to have as cultural gatekeepers. In consequence, cultural hierarchies
become unhinged. The single-authored book by a possibly renowned author has for
the bigger part of its history been the standard model of autobiography. An expanding
array of technical media, however, has made for a “größere Vielfalt an Selbstbezüg­
lichkeiten” [‘increasing diversity of self-referentialities’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 14),
that is no longer covered by a traditional notion of autobiography. Instead of account­
ing for an entire life in retrospect, these recent modes of auto-narrative may simply
relate a life lived on a daily basis. They do not even have to be self-authored; digital
100 1 Theoretical Approaches

self-tracking systems feed into the techno-utopian vision of a comprehensive record of

one’s life and dispense with a self-conscious author, once one of the linchpins of the
autobiographical tradition (Wolthers 2014). Whether automated or not, those ongoing
auto-narratives will not necessarily materialize in a finite body of work, and if so, they
might have lost in part what distinguished them in their original context (for the case
of the wartime blog by Baghdad based blogger Salman Pax turned into a book see
Whitlock 2007, 1–23). They may or may not aspire to be measured up against the evalu­
ative systems of art and literature, and they may not even be pegged neatly into one of
them. Augmented opportunities of self-expression and authorial self-fashioning “jen­
seits der Autographie” [‘beyond autography’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 14; emphasis
mine) call into question “das Privileg der Schrift” [‘the privilege of writing’] (Dünne
and Moser 2008b, 14), relying on an assortment of images and texts instead that do
not integrate into a narrative account. Nevertheless, these modes of self-referencing
and self-reflexivity establish and follow aesthetic patterns. However, they often do so
as artistically non-conspicuous, vernacular practices.

Summing Up
In view of a profoundly “altered fabric of autobiographical expression” (Whitlock
2007, 4), its theoretical conceptualization, too, is in a state of transition. The theory of
autobiography tries to adapt in terms of methodology and scope to a widening field
of research. It does so in part by transcending the borders of individual disciplines
towards media studies as an overarching conceptual framework. The expanding field
of research and its reassessment have called for terminological amends too. As new
media, such as the personal web site, allow for a dovetailing of the daily life with a con­
tinuous production of texts and images, it has been suggested to talk more appropri­
ately of ‘autofiction’ rather than of ‘autobiography’ (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 12). Dünne
and Moser even went so far as to tentatively supplant ‘autobiography’ by the broader,
less restrictive term ‘automediality’ (2008b, 11). Considering how media-technological
innovations, the production of multimodal ‘texts’ and the notion of the authorial self
have been interfering with each other in the past decades, the new term might help,
as Dünne and Moser argue, to understand ‘self-expression as a mediated and cul­
tural practice that translates itself into a broad range of forms’ (2008b, 15). It is uncer­
tain whether ‘automediality’ will indeed displace its more traditional counterpart.
However, four decades after the initial publication of Bruss’ seminal essay “Eye for I”,
neither film nor media in general, pose a threat to autobiography any longer. Instead,
it has been widely acknowledged that they contribute considerably to broaden and
enrich the autobiographical genre which, in turn, has led literary criticism and media
studies to forge closer ties.
 1.10 Media Studies 101

Works Cited
Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing & Life Writing. Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/
London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Blazejewski, Susanne. Bild und Text – Photographie in autobiographischer Literatur. Marguerite
Duras’ L’Amant und Michael Ondaatjes Running in the Family. Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2002.
Bruss, Elizabeth W. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film.” Autobiography: Essays
Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 268–295.
Curtis, Robin. Conscientious Viscerality: The Autobiographical Stance in German Film and Video.
Berlin: Gebrüder Mann/Edition Imorde, 2006.
Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser, eds. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen
Medien. München: Fink, 2008 (Dünne and Moser 2008a).
Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung. Automedialität.” Automedialität: Subjekt-
konstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München:
Fink, 2008. 7–16 (Dünne and Moser 2008b).
Hedberg, Hans, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson, and Louise Wolthers, eds. Auto: Self-representa-
tion and Digital Photography. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014.
Kawashima, Kentaro. Autobiographie und Photographie nach 1900: Proust, Benjamin, Brinkmann,
Barthes, Sebald. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011.
Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2002.
Lebow, Alisa, ed. The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. London/
New York: Wallflower Press, 2012.
Lejeune, Philippe. “Cinema et autobiographie. Problèmes de vocabulaire.” Revue Belge du Cinéma
19 (1987): 5–12.
Lundby, Knut, ed. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories. Self-representations in New Media. New
York et al.: Lang, 2008.
Mitchell, William John T., and Mark Boris N. Hansen. “Introduction.” Critical Terms for Media Studies.
Ed. William John T. Mitchell and Mark Boris N. Hansen. Chicago/London: University of Chicago
Press, 2010. vii–xxii.
Montémont, Véronique. “Le pacte autobiographique et la photographie.” Le français aujourd’hui
161.2 (2008): 43–50.
Mora, Gilles. “Manifeste photobiographique” (1983). Traces photographiques/Traces autobio-
graphiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Univer-
sité de Saint-Étienne, 2004. 103–106 (Mora 2004a).
Mora, Gilles. “Photobiographies” (1999). Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques.
Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-
Étienne, 2004. 107–113 (Mora 2004b).
Münker, Stefan. Philosophie nach dem “Medial Turn”. Beiträge zu einer Theorie der Medien­
gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.
Renov, Michael. “The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video.” The Subject
of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 104–119 (Renov
2004a).
Renov, Michael. “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in post-verité Age.” The
Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 171–181
(Renov 2004b).
Renov, Michael. “The Electronic Essay.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2004. 182–190 (Renov 2004c).
102 1 Theoretical Approaches

Renov, Michael. “Video Confessions.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University

of Minnesota Press, 2004. 191–215 (Renov 2004d).
Renov, Michael. “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self.” The Subject of
Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 216–229 (Renov
2004e).
Renov, Michael. “The End of Autobiography or New Beginnings? (or, Everything You Never Knew
Would Know about Someone You Will Probably Never Meet).” The Subject of Documentary.
Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 230–243 (Renov 2004f).
Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997.
Sitney, Adams P. “Autobiography in avant-garde film.” The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 199–246.
Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.
Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Einleitung: Was ist Auto(r)fiktion?” Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren
der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 7–21.
Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons. Autobiography in Transit. Chicago/London: Chicago University
Press, 2007.
Wolthers, Louise. “Autographing: Digitized Self-Imagery.” Auto: Self-representation and Digital
Photography. Ed. Hans Hedberg, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson and Louise Wolthers. Stock-
holm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014. 57–81.

Further Reading
Hughes, Peter. “Blogging Identity.com.” The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person
Documentary. Ed. Alisa Lebow. London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. 235–249.
Kittner, Alma-Elisa. Visuelle Autobiographien. Sammeln als Selbstentwurf bei Hannah Höch, Sophie
Calle und Annette Messager. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.
Weiser, Jutta, and Christine Ott, eds. Autofiktion und Medienrealität. Kulturelle Formungen des post-
modernen Subjekts. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013.
1.11 Narratology
Martin Löschnigg

As a narrative genre, ‘autobiography/autofiction’ is the subject of narratology, the

theoretical and systematic study of narrative(s). Narratological approaches to autobi­
ography will thus focus on the narrative dimension (‘narrativity’) of autobiography/
autofiction and on the role of narrative in the autobiographical subject’s construction
and representation of itself. According to Michael Sheringham, different positions
on autobiography have usually depended on “prevailing views of narrative”: “Any
moves towards a rehabilitation of narrative’s mimetic, heuristic or pragmatic func­
tions are likely to support comparable shifts in the way autobiography is regarded”
(1993, 23). Accordingly, narratological positions on autobiography/autofiction have
reflected developments in narratology from its structuralist orientation until the late
1970s, to its opening up towards a wide range of disciplines (e. g. psychology and
the neurosciences, sociology and historiography) and its branching out into feminist,
cultural-historical and cognitive ‘narratologies’ since the 1980s.

Structuralist Narratology and Autobiography/

Autofiction
In ‘classical’ structuralist narratology, autobiographical discourse is conceptualized as
(quasi-)autobiographical first-person narration (Stanzel 2009 [1979]) or autodiegetic
narration (Genette etc.), the most frequent variant of homodiegesis. ‘Homodiegesis’
means that an identity in person exists between the narrative instance and one of
the characters (or ‘agents’) on the level of the story (diegesis), i. e. the sequence of
events (including internal communication) as rendered by the text. In contrast, het­
erodiegetic narrators (third-person narrators) do not belong to the diegetic or story
level in the sense that they are also agents on that level. Autobiographical narration is
‘autodiegetic’ since the homodiegetic narrator is the protagonist, relating his/her own
life-story or part of it. In conventional first person narratives, norms of empirical plau­
sibility apply, which means that the narrator’s perspective is limited (in contrast to
the omniscience of authorial heterodiegetic narrators) and internal with regard to the
representation of his/her own consciousness. Engaging with the foundational works
of Lämmert (1980 [1955]), Stanzel, Genette, Booth (1983 [1961]) and Cohn (1978), schol­
ars like Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Bal (1985) and others have subsequently refined these
categories especially with a view to increasingly experimental forms of post-modernist
narratives, yet have basically retained them.
Structuralist narratology concentrated on fictional narratives, and this also
applies to its investigation of homodiegesis, which was analyzed primarily with regard

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104 1 Theoretical Approaches

to plotlines and genres, to forms of focalization and to the problem of unreliable nar­
ration in narrative fiction. In itself, homodiegetic narration was largely considered
as unproblematic, and discussions concentrated on phenomena which primarily
pertain to heterodiegetic fiction, like for instance types of focalization, figural nar­
ration (Stanzel) and free indirect discourse. Accordingly, the models and categories
proposed by Cohn, Genette, Stanzel and others show only minor differences, except
for terminology, in the way they conceive of (quasi-)autobiographical first-person
narration (Stanzel), autodiegetic narration (Genette) and (dissonant) self-narration
(Cohn). If homodiegetic narration proved controversial, it was mainly in connection
with the discussion on ‘voice’ and the significance of the third/first person opposition,
which saw Genette, Cohn, and Stanzel united against Wayne C. Booth, who regarded
this opposition as “[p]erhaps the most overworked distinction” (1983 [1961], 150). It
had been Käte Hamburger, however, who had assigned the utmost significance to
this distinction, since her definition of “epische Fiktion” [“epic fiction”] (Hamburger
1994, 66 [1973, 136]) was restricted to the heterodiegetic (in Genettean terms), while
she regarded first-person narration as a “fingierte Wirklichkeitsaussage” [“feigned
reality statement”] (Hamburger 1994, 268 [1973, 313]), i. e. an imitation of referential
discourse.
Drawing on Hamburger, Cohn (1990) and Genette (1990) probed the boundaries
between factual and fictional narratives by trying to define textual “signposts of fic­
tionality” (Cohn 1990, passim); with regard to homodiegesis, they agree on the impos­
sibility of an intrinsic distinction, i. e. on the fact that there are no textual criteria
which allow the reader to distinguish between ‘fictional autobiography’ of the David
Copperfield (1849/1850) type and the autobiography of a really existing (historical)
person. If a line can be drawn here, it is only on the basis of the onomastic (non-)
identity of author and narrator as indicated in a paratext. Evidently, this coincides
with Philippe Lejeune’s (1975) taxonomy and the autobiographical pact, which the
personal identity of author and narrator proffers to the reader. In the case of factual
autobiography, the homodiegetic rootedness of the narrative voice in the world of the
narrative rests on actual embodiment, and the ensuing ‘materiality’ provides a crite­
rion which in principle distinguishes it from other (fictional) forms of writing (Smith
and Watson 2005).
Among the categories developed by structuralist narratology, the distinction
between two ‘components’, as it were, of homodiegetic (and especially of auto­
diegetic) narrators remains of heuristic value for the study of autobiography/auto­
fiction: Variously referred to as the ‘narrated’ or ‘experiencing’ self on the one hand,
and the ‘narrating self/I’ on the other, these categories render the dual aspect of the
(fictional) autobiographer as experiencer and narrator and the epistemological and
chronological distance between them. Narratives may emphasize either the one or
the other, focalizing on the experiencer in “consonant” or the narrator in “dissonant
self-narration” (Cohn 1978, 145–161).
 1.11 Narratology 105

Historical and Cultural Narratology

One of the main points of criticism levelled against structuralist narratology has been
its concentration on the synchronic and text-centered analysis of narrative struc­
tures, to the virtual exclusion of diachronic and contextual considerations. Since the
late 1980s, therefore, narratologists like Monika Fludernik or Ansgar Nünning have
investigated the function of forms of narrative and of narrative genres in their cul­
tural contexts, especially also with a view to historical developments. According to
Nünning, narrative structures are highly semanticized, which calls for a “context-sen­
sitive and diachronic approach to narratives” (Nünning 2000, 356) in contrast to the
synchronic and text-centred orientation of structuralist narratology. Along the same
lines, Fludernik claims that “[b]esides providing […] terminological and descriptive
tools, narratology can also help to analyse the historical development of different
types of narrative” (Fludernik 2000, 86). With regard to autobiography/autofiction,
this means that historical investigations of these forms could be based on narrative
parameters, since these are expressive of culturally determined forms of ‘self-fash­
ioning’ and of changing conceptions of the self. Also, diachronic analysis permits a
more differentiated account of the interaction between factual and fictional forms of
autobiographical narration than the concept of “formal mimetics” (Glowinski 1977,
106) which dominated structuralist narratology, i. e. the view that fictional genres
evolve in imitation of their non-fictional counterparts. Considering English autobi­
ographical writing, for example, it appears that the development of a mode of auto­
diegetic narration that captures the individual dimension of experience rather than
emphasizing the exemplary, in other words the model for secular autobiography, was
inextricably linked with the rise of the early eighteenth-century novel. In a wider
sense, all these historical phenomena may be subsumed under ‘cultural narratology’.
For Mark Currie, the necessity of a “cultural narratology” is first of all based on the
ubiquity of narrative as a cultural phenomenon, secondly on the fact that ‘culture’
as such is constituted (and passed on) in the form of narrative(s) (Currie 1998, 96).
In this respect, narratology assumes the role of an interface between textual analysis
and context-oriented approaches by proposing “models that are jointly formal and
functional – models attentive both to the text and to the context of stories” (Herman
1999, 8).

Cognitive Narratology and Narrative Concepts of

Identity
Post-structuralist narratology is informed by an awareness that narrative discourse
constitutes rather than merely represents stories, including life-stories. This new
awareness in narratology appears particularly relevant for the study of autobiogra­
106 1 Theoretical Approaches

phy/autofiction as recent theoretical approaches to autobiography (notably that of

Paul John Eakin [see Eakin 1992, 1999]) have emphasized the role of narrative in the
construction of a sense of identity. Because of its interdisciplinary orientation, con­
temporary narratology may bring to focus developments in various disciplines, espe­
cially in linguistics and the cognitive sciences, which bear on autobiographical narra­
tive(s), and may thus develop models and categories for a narratologically grounded
discussion of autobiographical discourse. Cognitive narratology has become an
interdisciplinary project in itself, drawing from and combining disciplines such as
cognitive psychology, frame theory, linguistics, and the study of artificial intelli­
gence (Herman 2003; Hogan 2004). In particular, the specific conditions of memory
and their importance for the constitution of identity have become one of the central
fields of cognitive and especially of narrative psychology. Cognitive narratology may
therefore be aligned in a fruitful manner with narrative theories of autobiography to
provide valuable insights into the narrative structuring of individual experience and
the narrative construction of identity. Narratological investigation will fous (1) on the
discursive representation of the experiential in autobiography; (2) on narrativity and
the self, i. e. the role of narrative in the formation of identity; (3) on the role of frames
and scripts in the textual representation of memory; and finally (4) on the question of
the fictional in autobiography (Löschnigg 2010).
ad 1) Contemporary approaches to autobiography/autofiction emphasize the
role of the experiential in life writing. Rather than being viewed as an attempt by a
detached subject to interpret itself as object, the autobiographical act is regarded as
an experiential site in the sense that it stages a psychological re-living and cognitive
re-construction of experience. Autobiographical narrative may therefore be conceived
in terms of the frames of experiencing and reflection provided by models of cognitive
narratology.
One such model has been proposed by Monika Fludernik (1996). Her categories
are derived from spontaneous oral narrative, which she regards as prototypical of
the narrative rendering of specific experience. Basic to Fludernik’s understanding of
narrative is the concept of ‘experientiality’, which is described as an individualized
rendering of experience as reflected in human consciousness: “[Consciousness] both
mediates narrativity and constitutes one of its signifiers” (1996, 374). The continuity
of experience and narration which is thus central to Fludernik’s narratological model
has also been emphasized in recent theories of autobiography (Eakin 1992, 1999). In
particular, the emphasis on the ‘consciousness factor’ makes Fludernik’s model well-
suited to describe autobiographical narrative, since it is able to reflect the focus on the
inner life of the subject typical of most autobiographies/autofictions better than are
traditional, event-centered concepts of narrativity.
ad 2) Since contemporary narrative theory looks on narrative as both a text/dis­
course type and a psychological activity, narratological approaches consider autobi­
ography not so much as a representation (in the mimetic sense) of an autonomous
(and homogeneous) subject, but as a process through which identity is created:
 1.11 Narratology 107

When it comes to autobiography, narrative and identity are so intimately linked that each con­
stantly and properly gravitates into the conceptual field of the other. Thus, narrative is not merely
a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self – the
self of autobiographical discourse – does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative
(Eakin 1999, 100).

Drawing on the phenomenological narratology of Paul Ricoeur (Ricoeur 1983–1985

[1984–1988]), who proposes a parallel between the narrative pre-structuring of expe­
riences on the level of what he calls ‘mimesis I’, and their narrative configuration on
the level of ‘mimesis II’, Eakin emphasizes the epistemological function of narrative:
“[N]arrative plays a central, structuring role in the formation and maintenance of our
sense of identity” (Eakin 1999, 123).
The discussion on the role of narrative in life writing is linked to a similar debate,
in the 1960s and 1970s, on narrative and historiography in the philosophy of history.
In this debate, the function of narrative as a ‘cognitive instrument’ (Mink 1978) which
imposes order on contingent (historical) data and the role of the narrative ‘emplot­
ment’ (White 1978) of these data were emphasized. In the same way, Roy Pascal
claimed that “autobiography […] imposes a pattern on a life, it constructs out of it a
coherent story” (1960, 9), and Jerome Bruner (1990, 2003) has argued that the crea­
tion of meaning in autobiographical discourse rests on the construction of life stories
according to established narrative genres. While theorists like Bruner have thus attrib­
uted to narrative an epistemological (meaning-creating) function, others (in particular
Ricoeur and MacIntyre 1985) lean towards an ontological understanding, according to
which narrative discourse reflects a narrative order of experience and even of empiri­
cal reality as such. According to the latter position, autobiography/autofiction would
then have to be regarded as a double narrative structure – a narrative ‘emplotment’
of experiences which are already narratively (pre-)structured in themselves. Whether
one emphasizes the epistemological or ontological implications of narrative, however,
it follows that in both instances lives and identities will be understood in terms of
stories: “We achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use of the
narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as
an expression of a single unfolding and developing story” (Polkinghorne 1988, 50).
ad 3) In the case of autobiography/autofiction, narrative depends on the selec­
tive dynamics of memory. Since identity is inextricably linked to memory, narrative
explanations of identity must take into account the psychological and neurologi­
cal research on memory as pioneered by Bartlett (1932), Schacter (1996) and others.
According to Bartlett, memory involves the organizing of previous experience into
patterns of expectation for present experience, a process which produces the dynamic
‘scripts’ and ‘schemata’ (cognitive frames) described by modern cognitive psychol­
ogy. The fact that memory is shaped by the motivations of the present self makes it
relate to the present as much as to the past. As a result, autobiography/autofiction is
determined by a temporal duality which extends beyond the double chronological
structure which they already comprise due to the different epistemological horizons
108 1 Theoretical Approaches

involved in retrospective (memory-based) narration. This temporal duality may also

serve to qualify the view that narratological approaches to identity focus on a past
self which is re-constructed, as it were, from the point of view of the present, largely
neglecting the present itself: “If subjects come into being through their relationship
with narratives, then narratives are formed in time; […] but the form of narrative time
[…] does not flow in only one direction” (Williams 1995, 126). Through its focus on
narrative as a mode of cognition, and on relevant scripts and frames, cognitive narra­
tology may function as a bridge between autobiography/autofiction studies and psy­
chology and the neurosciences, including psycho- and neurolinguistics.
Due to the embedding of individual memory in collective/cultural memory,
anthropological and sociological aspects of the narrativizing of memory must be con­
sidered, too. The integration of experiential reality into socio-culturally determined
frames is a process in which, according to Bruner, narrative categories play an impor­
tant role: “The typical form of framing experience (and our memory of it) is in nar­
rative form […]” (Bruner 1990, 569). Narrative further helps cognition by establishing
causal connections and by providing a framework which enables the specific to be
integrated into the typical, and actual occurrences into expectations (Herman 2003).
Similarly, for Bruner “the ‘suggestiveness’ of a story lies […] in the emblematic nature
of its particulars, its relevance to a more inclusive narrative type” (1991, 7). This cor­
relates with one of the central tenets of cognitive narratology, namely the tendency
towards ‘naturalization’ on the part of readers, i. e. their integration of texts into real-
life frames or familiar generic frames. In the case of autobiographical narratives, the
generic frame is that of the ‘life-story’, and the reception of autobiographical writing
will therefore be determined ultimately by those cultural factors which shape prevail­
ing views on narrative and the transparency (or opacity) of language with regard to
the rendering of a life as lived.
ad 4) Narrative explanations of identity as processual entail a new conceptual­
ization of the relationship between fictionality and autobiography. This new concep­
tualization stands in contrast to a traditional hermeneutic understanding of autobi­
ography, but also to the deconstructivist view which regards fiction as an element
that will undermine any attempt at constructing identity. Now, fictionality is seen as
an integrative element of the creation of a sense of identity, since identity conceived
as a narrative construct involves the projection of possible selves which are open to
revision. Through the narrative medium, the autobiographer explores alternative ver­
sions of ‘self’ and ‘other’, constructing and revising concepts of self and identity in the
same way as characters/agents are construed in fiction. With a view to the reception
of narratives, contemporary narratology conceives of coherence as a cognitive strat­
egy rather than a formal structure, which in turn would prevent readers from taking
autobiography as an ‘authentic’ narrative of identity.
 1.11 Narratology 109

Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen.
Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Bartlett, Frederick. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1932.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed.
1983.
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21.
Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990):
775–804.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. Houndsmills/London: Macmillan, 1998.
Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992.
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell University
Press, 1999.
Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
Fludernik, Monika. “Beyond Structuralism in Narratology: Recent Developments and New Horizons
in Narrative Theory.” Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes 11.1 (2000):
83–96.
Genette, Gérard. “Discours du récit.” Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. 65–267.
Genette, Gérard. Nouveau Discours du récit. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983.
Genette, Gérard. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 755–774.
Glowinski, Michál. “On the First-Person Novel.” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 103–114.
Hamburger, Käte. Die Logik der Dichtung (1957). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta/J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung
Nachfolger, 4th ed. 1994 [The Logic of Literature. Trans. Marylin J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1973].
Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: Center for the Study of
Language and Information, 2003.
Herman, David. “Introduction: Narratologies.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analy-
sis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts. A Guide for Humanists. New York/
London: Routledge, 2004.
Lämmert, Eberhard. Bauformen des Erzählens (1955). Stuttgart: Metzler, 7th ed. 1980.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
Löschnigg, Martin. “Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography.” Postclassical Nar-
ratology: Approaches and Analyses. Ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2010. 255–274.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press,
1985.
Mink, Louis O. “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.” The Writing of History. Ed. Robert H.
Canary and Henri Kozicki. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 129–149.
Nünning, Ansgar. “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: A Survey of Diachronic
Approaches, Concepts and Research Projects.” Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings. Ed.
Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2000. 345–373.
110 1 Theoretical Approaches

Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.
Polkinghorne, Donald. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988.
Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et Récit. 3 vols. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1983–1985 [Time and Narrative.
3 vols. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984–1988].
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.
Schacter, Daniel. Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books,
1996.
Sheringham, Michael. French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narra-
tive Theorists.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz.
Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 356–371.
Stanzel, Franz Karl. Theorie des Erzählens (1979). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 8th ed.
2008.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1978.
Williams, Linda Ruth. Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject. London: Edward
Arnold, 1995.

Further Reading
Bertaux, Daniel. Les récits de vie. Paris: Nathan, 1997.
Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal Carbaugh, eds. Narrative and Identity. Studies in Autobiography, Self
and Culture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001.
Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern
World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity. Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000.
Linde, Charlotte. Life Stories. The Creation of Coherence. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993.
Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001.
1.12 Philosophy
Dieter Thomä

Given that philosophy is concerned with conceptual analysis, its main contribution to
the theory of autobiography and autofiction is the analysis of these composite terms.
Philosophers scrutinize the reflective stance of αὐτός (autos, the self), βίος (bios, life),
γράφειν (graphein, writing), and fiction. The following discussion will be confined
to the first three of these terms, as a sound philosophical discussion of autofiction is
still lacking. (A discussion of autofiction would likely build on the multiple meanings
of ‘fingere’ – feigning, inventing, fashioning, shaping, creating, making, etc. – and
explore the oscillations between a simulated and a ‘self-made’ life.) Autobiography
is not just one philosophical topic among others, philosophy needs to engage with it
on a more fundamental methodological level. Philosophers who are writers in their
own right study autobiography in order to sharpen their self-description. The philo­
sophical ‘I’ and the autobiographical ‘I’ may be distant relatives, philosophers may
shy away from the idea of writing about themselves, but in order to fully capture the
terms of their assignment, they need to engage in a dialogue with autobiography. After
turning to this general methodological issue some conceptual findings on the self,
life, and writing will be summarized.
It may be said that the philosopher is the autobiographer’s favourite enemy and
vice versa. The former aims at universality whereas the latter muses about particular­
ities. Yet this clear-cut distinction is deceptive. In Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of
Modernity, Stephen Toulmin reminds of the twofold origin of modernity by going back
to two philosophers that he regards as its founding fathers (Toulmin 1990). He juxta­
poses René Descartes (1596–1650), the undisputed champion of modern philosophy
and rationality, and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), author of the seminal Essais
and founder of a much more elusive legacy of self-comprehension. Toulmin’s account
is polemical in nature. He seeks to curtail Descartes’s role and reinstall Montaigne as
his contender. Yet the difference between these two thinkers does not consist in the
fact that Descartes skips or brackets selfhood and turns to universal claims whereas
Montaigne embraces the role of an individual and assumes the task of portraying
himself. Descartes reflects on the supposed “médiocrité de mon esprit & la courte
durée de ma vie” [“mediocrity of my mind” and “short duration of my life”], and so
does Montaigne (Descartes 1982, 3 [1998, 3]; Montaigne 1962, 79–95 [1991, 89–108],
270–276 [314–320]). Descartes intends “d’estudier […] en moymesme” [“to study within
myself”], Montaigne says: “C’est moy que je peins” [“It is myself I paint”] (Descartes
1982, 10 [1998, 6]; Montaigne 1962, 9 [1991, LXIII]). Both authors address autobiogra­
phy, albeit in extremely different ways. The bearings of their accounts help delineate
the intricate relationship between philosophy and autobiography.
Descartes’ Discours de la méthode [Discourse on Method] and his Meditationes
[Meditations] are presented in the form of a narrative, they allude to travels and

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112 1 Theoretical Approaches

dreams and describe the itinerary of a young man who seeks to “melius […] nosse
quisnam sim” [“know a little better who I am”] (Descartes 1983, 29 [1998, 66]). This
endeavour culminates in a short-circuiting of ‘to know’ and ‘to be’, of knowledge and
being. The one thing that I end up knowing about myself for sure is the fact that I have
the capacity of knowing something or, in general, of thinking. Descartes dismisses
other findings like “me habere vultum, manus, brachia, […] me nutriri, incedere” etc.
[“that I ha[ve] […] a face, hands, arms, […] that I [take] […] in food, that I walk […]
about”] (1983, 26 [1998, 64]). All these qualifications are doubtful and secondary. True
self-knowledge is a product of ultimate reduction and purification. The philosopher
aims at stripping the world off his ego and reduces life to thinking. Descartes’ project
is an autobiography of a peculiar kind, an autobiography that gets rid of ‘bios’, or, as
one could put it, an ‘auto-graphy’.
Any theory of autobiography has to account for the fact that it oscillates between
self-description and self-invention, between authenticity and role-play, between “mon
cœur mis à nu” [“my heart laid bare”] (Baudelaire 1975 [1950]) and a character made
up. By reducing the ‘I’ to the ‘ego cogitans’, Descartes circumvents this ambiguity.
Any move, any claim made by the ‘ego’ is based on the performative evidence that it
is me who thinks just that. The thinker, the writer is not exposed to a life that – “how
curious! how real!” (Whitman 1996, 176) – he could find troublesome or blissful. Des­
cartes aims at “reformer mes propre pensées et de bastir dans un fons qui est tout a
moy” [“reform[ing] my own thoughts and building upon a foundation which is com­
pletely my own”] (1982, 15 [1998, 9]).
This strategy of purification leads to a strong notion of personal autonomy. Inad­
vertently, Descartes becomes the forerunner of a notion of the autonomous author,
granting him the ability to create his own new world from the scratch. Yet Descartes
and his rationalist followers do not read the autonomous stance of the ‘ego’ as an
invitation to various “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman 1978). As their account of
autonomy is based on thinking, it is bound by the rules of reason. Their philosophical
language aims at universal truths.
The purification of the ‘ego’ leads to a neutralized description of the person.
When one thinks or writes something, when one talks about himself/herself, the
envisaged object or content remains coincidental. It gains relevance only by virtue
of the fact that one refers to it. Only one property of a person matters: the fact
that s/he thinks. As s/he shares this feature with anybody else, every person has
the same ‘ego’. This view is corroborated by the transformation of ‘I’ as pronoun
to ‘I’ as noun. Whenever a pronoun is used one cannot help but wonder for whom
it stands, to whom it refers. One thinks of a person with a name, with a history,
with qualities, one does not think of an “unencumbered self” (for a critique of this
notion see Sandel 1984). When promoted from pronoun to noun, the ‘I’ becomes an
independent entity attributed to each and every person in the same manner. The
substantivized ‘I’ takes the step from particularity to universality. After getting rid
of the ‘bios’, the next step taken by Descartes in his destruction of autobiography
 1.12 Philosophy 113

is the universalization of the self. There is only one standard auto-graphy for every-
one.
This completes the picture of a philosopher being inimical or immune to autobi­
ography. Neither is s/he interested in depicting the whereabouts and circumstances of
a particular life – be it his or another –, nor is s/he willing to raise her singular voice,
to speak up as an individual. S/he is a spokesperson or a ventriloquist of the universal.
This orthodox, dominant view is established by Descartes, endorsed by Leibniz,
Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, and taken for granted by today’s analytic philoso­
phers. If some philosophers like Heidegger and the deconstructionists take issue with
the substantivized ego, they still share Descartes’s discontent with individuality.
The heterodox, marginalized tradition which objects to the elimination of auto­
biography in philosophy is put forward by Montaigne and continued by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Roland
Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and others. The following remarks are confined to Montaigne.
He writes:

Les autres forment l’homme; je le recite et en represente un particulier bien mal ormé, et lequel, si
j’avoy à façonner de nouveau, je ferois frayement bien autre qu’il n’est. […] Je ne peints pas l’estre.
Je peints le passage. […] Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure. […] Mon ame […] est tousjours
en apprentissage et en espreuve. Je propose une vie basse et sans lustre […]. On attache aussi
bien toute la philosophie morale à une vie populaire et privée que à une vie de plus riche estoffe;
chaque homme porte la forme entiere de l’humaine condition. […] Si le monde se plaint de quoy
je parle trop de moy, je me plains de quoy il ne pense seulement pas à soy.
[Others form Man; I give an account of Man and sketch a picture of a particular one of them who is
very badly formed and whom I would truly make very different from what he is if I had to fashion
him afresh. […] I am not portraying being but becoming. […] I must adapt this account of myself
to the passing hour. […] My soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested. I am expounding a
lowly, lacklustre existence. You can attach the whole moral philosophy to a commonplace private
life just as well as to one of richer stuff. Every man bears the whole form of the human condi­
tion. […] If all complain that I talk too much about myself I complain that they never even think
about their own selves] (Montaigne 1962, 782–783 [1991, 907–908]).

Montaigne’s defence of autobiography is an anticipated response to Descartes’s cri­

tique. His argument goes beyond the mere attempt to reinstall autobiography as a
legitimate literary form. He seeks to save the autobiographical mode of philosophy
itself, and he does so, to put it briefly, by going back from ‘ego’ as a noun to ‘I’ as a
pronoun. The consequences of this move become visible both on the level of what he
talks about and on the level of who does the talking.
If Montaigne had to discuss Descartes’s account of the ‘ego cogitans’, he would
call it a philosophical mistake to create a gap between me and my properties and to
launch an isolated ‘thinking thing’. I am intrinsically, inescapably linked to a wide
range of properties for the very reason that talking about me already entails the ref­
erence to what I stand for. This is a grammatical argument turned into an ontological
claim giving preference to ‘becoming’ or transition over ‘being’. What can be said
114 1 Theoretical Approaches

about me does not go beyond and should not go beyond my entanglement with the
world. Descartes’s purification is unfeasible, he misconceives the person by denying
embodiment. This does not mean that, on the level of content, Montaigne’s self-por­
trait is bound to consist of personal statements about his petty affairs. By talking about
one single, exemplary individual, he does learn something about “la forme entiere de
l’humaine condition” [“the whole Form of the human condition”] (Montaigne 1962,
783 [1991, 908]). According to Montaigne, there is no other way to access this ‘condi­
tion’ than by sticking to the individual, as we exist as such individuals only. The very
idea of an isolated, substantivized, generalized ‘ego’ leads to a distorted view of how
we, as humans, live or of “how we get along” (Velleman 2009). Montaigne bears the
restriction coming with the junction of philosophy and autobiography as it serves the
purpose of rendering a proper picture of the human being.
The fact that I mingle with the world also affects the stance of the philosopher fan­
cying himself as the spokesperson of the universal. My statements come with validity
claims, but they are my statements, and it is me who is obliged and entitled to defend
them. Propositions are speech-acts, thinking is acting and, as such, implies an actor
who raises his “voice” (Cavell 1994, VII, 3, 58) and enters the on-going “conversation
of mankind” (Oakeshott 1959; see Rorty 1979, 389–394).
It should have become clear by now that philosophy cannot just regard autobiog­
raphy as a more or less interesting topic that may deserve its scrutiny while remaining
altogether alien to it. Modern philosophy emerges on a stage on which it has a joint
appearance with autobiography. One could even make the case that this ‘liaison dan­
gereuse’ begins much earlier, as it is conceivable that, e. g., Socrates, Seneca, and
St. Augustine could get involved in this debate as well. This is not the place to bring
the battle between orthodox and heterodox philosophers to a close. Suffice it to say
that there is such a battle and that it has been widely overlooked and underrated.
In the following sections selected philosophical findings on the conceptual fabric
of auto-bio-graphy will be presented. (For a different account of this hyphenated noun
see Gusdorf 1991.)

Self
Autobiography is a specific form of biography, a text written by a person about herself.
Self-reflective activity is not limited to writing; it comes in various forms which include
self-consciousness, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-determination, self-posses­
sion, self-respect, self-confidence, self-invention, self-management, self-assertion,
self-deception, self-hate, and self-love. The basic self-reflective operation is: a refers
to b, and a equals b.
Strictly speaking, autobiography does not come with the claim that a ‘self’ (a char­
acter, a personality, etc.) is represented in a text, but with the more modest contention
 1.12 Philosophy 115

that a person engages in self-reflective activity. Many autobiographies aim higher and
appeal to the idea of giving a comprehensive account of oneself or of rendering an
appealing self-image. Much of the philosophical debate on autobiography grapples
with the question of personal identity: The debate is divided between constructivist
and hermeneutic approaches, with the former stressing creativity, contingency, and
experimentation (Glover 1988), and the latter emphasizing historicity, authenticity,
and closure (Ricoeur 1990). Yet this controversy does not do justice to the proper,
initial meaning of ‘auto’ in autobiography, in which ‘self’ merely serves as a relational
term. One refers to oneself, yet who ‘one’ is remains undecided. It is this relational or
reflective capacity that matters, not any definition of the self.
Autobiography is a derivative from the distinctively human capacity to refer
to oneself, to step aside, and to gain a fresh look at oneself. Helmuth Plessner had
this ability in mind when he described the “exzentrische Positionalität” [‘eccentric
positionality’] of humans (Plessner 1928, 288–346). This formula conveys a twofold
message. Plessner does not just emphasize self-reflection as an unconditioned,
self-sufficient procedure. He first hints at the fact that a human being finds him or
herself in a ‘position’, which literally comes with coordinates, and then turns to the
human being gaining distance from its given stance or location.
If one looks at all those procedures that involve self-reflective behaviour, one
comes across a puzzling fact that makes the identity of a relating to a dubious. It is
a necessary condition that, in self-reflection, one relates to oneself. There is no third
party involved. If the Delphic Oracle says: ‘Know Thyself’, it does not want you to
look at your beloved or to compare apples and oranges. This requirement seems to be
met in self-knowledge, self-awareness, or self-consciousness. Yet even in these cases
one may run into trouble with the identity implied in self-reflection. If I am conscious
of something and if this something happens to be myself, my being conscious still
differs from my being referred to in conscious acts. And what about self-deception?
In this case we seem to encounter some kind of personality split, in which a self talks
itself into something. The deceiver, in this case, cannot be the same as the deceived,
otherwise the deception would be unveiled immediately. This difference threatens to
subvert the identity of the terms figuring in the self-reflective equation. This becomes
even more evident when one transcends the epistemological realm and turns to atti­
tudes involving some kind of normative or emotional self-assessment or practical
self-steering. Self-hate is unthinkable without the revulsion and disgust that brings
me up against me as if I were a stranger to myself. Self-management only works if I
have the power to challenge the sluggard that I happen to be – a power and determi­
nation that this sluggard obviously lacks.
If I refer to myself or reflect on myself, the two personifications involved cannot
be coextensive. The identity invoked by self-reflection has to be taken with a grain
of salt. By spelling out the implications of self-reflection it can be concluded that we
are entitled to acknowledge or deny, appreciate or depreciate, enhance or suppress
certain features of our selves. I do not refer to myself as a well-defined, compact entity.
116 1 Theoretical Approaches

When referring to my doing x, having y, or feeling z (Tugendhat 1989), I wrestle with

my self-definition.
This finding is instrumental for understanding the functioning of autobiography,
which represents a particularly complicated case of self-reflective behaviour. Such
behaviour allows for or even requires a distinction between different personifications
of oneself. In most of the cases discussed above, this differentiation is bipartite. One
meets, for instance, the hater and learns about the things s/he hates about himself.
In the case of autobiography, this differentiation is threefold. The autobiographical
setting comprises the author who writes, the protagonist figuring in the text, and the
person being written about. (In autofiction, the third personification has vanished.)
All three are identical – yet only in some measure (Thomä 1998, 25–37).
As a writer, I am different from the person who lives. The person I am writing
about is different from the protagonist who serves as the author’s main character.
Only if we keep these roles apart, only if we prevent the differences between them from
collapsing, can we explore the potential and the pitfalls of autobiographical writing.
We understand, for instance, why I, as an author, may want to envisage a protagonist
who differs from me as a person, or why I, as an author, may want to overcome me as
a person, or why I, as a person, may elude the protagonist’s embrace. Moreover, there
are extremely different answers to the question of who of these figures is ‘in the lead’
and how activity and perceptivity are distributed. Some praise the author’s gift for
self-invention, others his commitment to conscientiously documenting or recording a
life. Some appreciate the protagonist’s malleability, others appeal to embeddedness
and traditionalism.

Life
An autobiographer does not tell anecdotes, s/he writes about his/her life. So s/he may
write about his affairs and hobbies, her routines and ventures, his anguishes and
hopes, her nightmares and pipedreams. But they still do not stand in for his life, or do
they? It would obviously be absurd to exclude all these incidents and experiences, yet
it would also be ill-founded to conclude that a life, which figures as autobiography’s
ultimate subject-matter, could be broken down to a set of distinct issues. Autobiogra­
phy aims at life as such. But what does that mean and how could it work?
An influential answer to this question is given by Dilthey. He says:
Die Selbstbiographie ist die höchste und am meisten instruktive Form, in welcher uns das Verste­
hen entgegentritt. […] Derselbe Mensch, der den Zusammenhang in der Geschichte seines Lebens
sucht, hat in all dem, was er als Werte seines Lebens gefühlt, als Zwecke desselben realisiert,
als Lebensplan entworfen hat, was er rückblickend als seine Entwicklung, vorwärtsblickend als
die Gestaltung seines Lebens und dessen höchstes Gut erfasst hat – in alledem hat er schon
einen Zusammenhang seines Lebens unter verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten gebildet, der nun
jetzt ausgesprochen werden soll. Er hat in der Erinnerung die Momente seines Lebens, die er als
 1.12 Philosophy 117

bedeutsam erfuhr, herausgehoben und akzentuiert und die anderen in Vergessenheit versinken
lassen. […] So sind die nächsten Aufgaben für die Auffassung und Darstellung geschichtlichen
Zusammenhangs hier schon durch das Leben selber halb gelöst. […] Die Selbstbiographie ist
nur die zu schriftstellerischem Ausdruck gebrachte Selbstbesinnung des Menschen über seinen
Lebensverlauf.
[In autobiography we encounter the highest and most instructive form of the understanding of
life. […] The same person who seeks the overall coherence of the story of his life has already pro­
duced a life-nexus according to various perspectives, namely in the ways he has felt the values
of his life, actualized its purposes, worked out a life-plan, either retrospectively when looking
back at his development or prospectively when looking forward to the formation of his life and
its highest good. These various ways of producing a life-nexus must now be articulated as a
life-history. The person’s memory has highlighted and accentuated those life-moments that were
experienced as significant; others have been allowed to sink into forgetfulness. […] Thus the
initial tasks involved in apprehending and explicating a historical nexus are already half solved
by life itself. […] Autobiography is merely the literary expression of the self-reflection of human
beings on their life-course] (Dilthey 1979, 200–201 [2002, 221–222, transl. altered]).

In this somewhat cumbersome passage written around 1910, Dilthey constructs a cor­
respondence between the living process itself and the formally accomplished autobi­
ography. The latter just serves as a platform for articulating or expressing a coherence
achieved beforehand. The story told represents a formal resumption of a life already
lived as a story. Hannah Arendt (1958, 184), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 135), Paul
Ricoeur (1984, 158), Charles Taylor (1989, 47, 52, 289), and many others follow Dilthey
in this respect, often without referring to his work. This view has also been influential
in other disciplines such as anthropology (Ochs and Capps 1996), psychology (Bruner
1987, 11–15; Bruner 1991; Kotre 1996), and psychoanalysis (Bollas 1993).
The correspondence between life and text allows Dilthey and his followers to cir­
cumvent a dilemma that runs as follows. An autobiography is supposed to be the
account of a life, which consists of an innumerable multitude of incidents. If a writer
had to account for all these incidents and live up to the task of really grasping a life,
autobiography would become a Sisyphus’s chore. Maybe one would have to settle for
spending the first half of a life living it and the second half writing it. Yet as life contin­
ues, the writer would be plainly unable to catch up with himself as a living person. The
most famous mockery of this dilemma is Lawrence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, in
which the author spends dozens of pages on describing the circumstances of his con­
ception before praising a “master-stroke of digressive skill” (1996, 46) and coming to
the conclusion that life outgrows text. This does not prevent the author from writing,
but his grip on reality becomes loose, casual, and playful.
In his response to Sterne’s dilemma, Dilthey disputes the primal fuzziness of life
and argues for a homology between the internal hermeneutic, narrative structure of
life itself and the autobiographical form. Many modern writers and theorists, includ­
ing Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kra­
cauer, dismiss the fusion between life and narrative without denouncing the ambition
to grasp the ‘real’. Philosophically speaking, Dilthey’s solution can be disputed on
118 1 Theoretical Approaches

two different levels, with more modest or more radical intentions (for the following
Thomä 1998; Thomä 2007; Blattner 2000; Strawson 2004).
The more modest critics adopt the view that life is lived as a story, but they
dispute the claim that an autobiography is a mere articulation or re-enactment of a
story already lived. The relation between the first (lived) and the second (told) story
is strained. Strategies like retrofitting, i. e. the attempt to retrospectively make things
fit in a certain way, are widespread, and these strategies undermine the homology
between those two stories. There is no neutral ground that would allow for an author­
itative comparison of the story lived and the story told. Thus autobiography cannot
uphold the claim that it actually grasps life as is.
In the vein of this modest critique one can also question the scope and value of
such a ‘life-history’. Does it really provide orientation, is it the showcase for sense-mak­
ing? Firm convictions, full-hearted commitments are at odds with the twists and turns
of a storyline. The coherence of a text is not prescriptive in the way that it allows for
one sequel only, its organizing power is weaker than the defenders of narrative ethics
(Newton 1995) want it to be.
The more ambitious critics question the very idea that life is lived as a story in the
first place and infer from this finding that autobiography, if committed to the ideal
of a ‘life-history’, presents a defective, distorted, streamlined view of life itself. Their
plea may serve the purpose of saving life from autobiography altogether, yet it could
also lead to a more liberal or liberating view of autobiography and alleviate its duties
with regard to the narrative reconstruction or production of a life as a whole. The more
ambitious critique is again put forward in different variants. Two main arguments are
to be considered.
The first argument cuts the link between life-history and story, it disputes the
idea of an all-encompassing life-history for the very reason that it does not do justice
to the transitory, momentary, floating quality of the living process. This does not
mean though that this process is ‘storyless’, a-narrative, or speechless altogether. Life
side-tracks ‘life-history’. Yet living beings as well as autobiographers do tell stories:
stories that are situative or occasionalistic. By telling these stories, they are entitled
to embrace fragmentation, the episodic and rhapsodic. This approach bears impor­
tant consequences for our understanding of human temporality and of the tension
between χρόνος (chronos) or temporal succession on the one hand, and καιρός (kairos)
or momentary experience on the other hand.
The second argument cuts the link between life and story in a more radical
manner. Those endorsing this argument do not aim at limiting the scope of story-tell­
ing, they claim that stories inevitably have the tendency of reaching out to life as
a whole, of establishing an imperialism of diachronicity. They turn to a reading of
self-experience that cuts the link between life and story-telling. “We live beyond any
tale that we happen to enact,” states the short story writer V. S. Pritchett (quoted and
endorsed by Strawson 2004, 451). It is debatable whether this kind of self-experience
is conceivable without any reference to some kind of tale or story.
 1.12 Philosophy 119

Writing
When talking about life as autobiography’s prime subject, the discussion has already
expanded to mediality and language. The short-circuiting of history and story pro­
posed by Dilthey led into a discussion of life and narrativity. The status of writing
itself has to be reconsidered and renegotiated and its use in autobiographical texts
has to be specified.
In his poem “Friedensfeier” [“Celebration of Peace”], Friedrich Hölderlin writes:
“Viel hat von Morgen an,/Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander,/Erfahren
der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang” [“Much, from the morning onwards,/Since
we have been a discourse and have heard from one another,/Has human kind learnt;
but soon we shall be song”] (Hölderlin 1992, 364 [1990, 235]). These lines challenge
the equation of life and story on an altogether different plane than that discussed in
the previous section. Hölderlin gives an answer to the question of what human being
is: we are “Gespräch” [“discourse” or conversation], or we are “Gesang” [“song”]. No
sighting of a story can be registered, but this absence is not due to the fact that lan­
guage is alienated from life. It is used in a different mode.
Even if falling short of Hölderlin’s high-flying “song”, the practice of autobio­
graphical writing comes in many variants. Montaigne, for instance, characterizes his
approach as an attempt to portray or “paint” himself, and he does so for the very
reason that he seeks to record momentary, transitory experiences and is suspicious of
the narrative ambition “à […] r’appiesser […] [les actions humaines et à] assortir ces
pieces” [“to knit [a man’s deeds] […] into one whole and […] to match up the pieces”]:
“Nul esprit genereux ne s’arreste en soy: […] il a des eslans au delà de ses effets” [“No
generous mind stops within itself […]; it springs past its limits”] (Montaigne 1962, 314,
1045 [1991, 373, 1211, transl. altered]). Montaigne’s is just one example taken out of the
rich repertoire of autobiographical forms. Again another example would be the col­
lage-like, topical (and strictly antichronological) structure employed by modern-day
writers like Roland Barthes (1994).
Narratives still represent the dominant form of autobiographical writing. What
exactly is a ‘narrative’? In 1935 Gertrude Stein stated in her typical punctuation-less
prose:

Narrative is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen has happened
will happen in any way. That is what narrative is and so of course there always is narrative […].
You are always listening to some one to something and you are always telling something to some
one or to any one. That is life the way it is lived (2010, 32–34).

According to her minimal definition, narrative writing is defined by a linguistic

sequence, a point of reference, an auctorial stance, and also, interestingly, by the ori­
entation at an addressee.
Among these criteria sequentiality stands out. The narrative trajectory leading
from a beginning to an end is said to re-enact the life-span between birth and death
120 1 Theoretical Approaches

(MacIntyre 1981, 191). Virginia Woolf carefully renegotiates this homology by settling
for a paradox which juxtaposes the truthfulness of a life-emulating narrative and its
disturbing ability to “make us believe” something: “The novel is the only form of art
which seeks to make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful record of the life of
a real person” (1958, 141).
The narrative consolidation of life has been questioned in order to liberate either
language or life – or both – from the yoke of chronology. This liberation is particu­
larly welcome in the autobiographical realm. Like the educational novel or ‘Bildungs­
roman’, the traditional biography of a third person typically follows a person’s life-
span. This homology between text and life is revoked in autobiography, as the author
does not mind surviving the narrative’s ending. S/he may shrink back from closure as
it anticipates mortification. Life must go on. The fact that the autobiographical equa­
tion between textual form and life-form falters comes as a relief for philosophy. She is
not doomed to be lifeless or hostile to life when using an impersonal language. This
relief conceals a challenge: Both philosophy and narrative writing are entitled and
obliged to do justice to human life in their own ways.

Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.
Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994].
Baudelaire, Charles. “Mon cœur mis à nu.” Œuvres completes. Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
676–708 [My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings. Ed. Peter Quennell. Trans. Norman
Cameron. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1950].
Blattner, William. “Life Is Not Literature.” The Many Faces of Time. Ed. John Barnett Brough and
Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. 187–201.
Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. London: Routledge,
1993.
Bruner, Jerome. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54 (1987): 11–32.
Brunner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21.
Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge/London: Harvard
University Press, 1994.
Descartes, René. Œuvres. Discours de la méthode & Essais. Vol. VI. Paris: Vrin, 1982 [Discourse on
Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1998].
Descartes, René. Œuvres. Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Vol. VII. Paris: Vrin, 1983 [Discourse
on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1998].
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. VII. Stuttgart/Göttingen: Teubner/Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1979 [Selected Works. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.
Vol. III. Ed. and trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2002].
Glover, Jonathan. I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity. London: Penguin, 1988.
Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.
 1.12 Philosophy 121

Gusdorf, Georges. Auto-bio-graphie: Lignes de vie 2. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991.

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. I. München/Wien: Hanser, 1992 [Hyperion and
Selected Poems. Ed. Eric L. Sandner. New York: Continuum Press, 1990].
Kotre, John. White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory. New York: Free Press, 1996.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981.
de Montaigne, Michel. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1962 [The Complete Essays. Ed. and
trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin, 1991].
Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Oakeshott, Michael. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. London: Bowes & Bowes,
1959.
Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 19–43.
Plessner, Helmuth. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische
Anthropologie. Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1928.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. I. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Sandel, Michael. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Political Theory 12.1
(1984): 81–96.
Stein, Gertrude. Narration: Four Lectures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Sterne, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ware: Wordsworth Editions,
1996.
Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17.4 (2004): 428–452.
Thomä, Dieter. Erzähle dich selbst. Lebensgeschichte als philosophisches Problem. München: Beck,
1998.
Thomä, Dieter. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Erzählung für das Leben.” Narrative Ethik: Das Gute
und das Böse erzählen. Ed. Karen Joisten. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007. 75–93.
Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Tugendhat, Ernst. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
Velleman, J. David. How We Get Along. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996.
Woolf, Virginia. Granite and Rainbow. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

Further Reading
Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Kerby, Anthony Paul. Narrative and the Self. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1991.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Nash, Cristopher, ed. Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and
Literature. London/New York: Routledge, 1990.
Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I–IV. Leipzig/Bern/Frankfurt a. M.: Teubner/
Francke/Schulte-Bulmke, 1907–1969 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part 1. Trans.
E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1998].
Thomä, Dieter, Vincent Kaufmann, and Ulrich Schmid. Der Einfall des Lebens. Theorie als geheime
Autobiographie. München: Hanser, 2015.
1.13 Political Science
Tracey Arklay

Auto/biography (‘Auto/biography’ is the term used throughout this entry when

referring to both autobiography and biography), is a form of ‘life-writing’ that fits
the broad rubric of the “biographical method” (Roberts 2002, X). While biography’s
focus is on the subject/object (with the subject usually dead) and the author able
to select, sometimes controversially, what to include or ignore; autobiography uses
memory as its primary material (Smith and Watson 2010, 22), with autobiographers
able to self-select what aspects of their life to focus on. Despite these limitations
the auto/biographical genre contributes to a body of knowledge that is informed by
history, anthropology and sociology. Its key focus is based upon understanding the
“other” (Vidich and Lyman 2000, 38). Life writing with a specific focus, e. g. poli­
tics, is termed “special purpose biography” (Brewer 2001, 723). Biography is one of
the oldest forms of political writing. Plutarch’s βίοι παράλληλοι [Parallel Lives] about
Ancient Greek and Roman leaders, is the first in a long line of biographies document­
ing the lives of “great men” (Brewer 2001, 721). It took many more centuries before the
writings of “great women” appeared (e. g. Eleanor Roosevelt’s Autobiography [1992];
Margaret Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years [1993]). The writings of post-colonial
leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Ghana’s first presi­
dent Kwame Nkrumah extends the genre further to include issues of race and class
(Brewer 2001, 721).

Reviewing the Genre

Diaries, memoirs and oral histories of political actors all fit within the autobiograph­
ical typology. As a qualitative research method, autobiography is rich in description
and, as with all first-person accounts, is subjective and partial. Unlike quantitative
research, the auto/biographical method does not provide a generalisable set of laws
that can be used to provide overarching and repeatable explanations. For that reason
it has been dismissed by some in the academy as lacking in rigour (Rhodes 2006,
43). Rather it is ideographic research, historical and interpretive, contextualised in
explaining specific, situated events. Life writing can be influenced by various streams
of political inquiry including feminism, psychology, institutionalism, constructivism
and post-colonialism. Together autobiographies, diaries and memoirs can provide
insights into how politics works in practice, albeit from a privileged position and of
a particular time. As such they give researchers an insight into the actions and views
of elites, helping to construct meaning and understand political leadership. They are
stories that allow “multiple interpretations” of events to unfold (Rhodes and Brown,
2005, 167) and the possibility for hidden patterns to emerge (Kearney 2002, 12).

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 1.13 Political Science 123

The genre of political biography and autobiography is just one of many research
methods that fall under the rubric of political science: governance, the study of elites,
institutionalism, group behaviour and executive studies (see Walter 2014). Auto/bi­
ography is not historical analysis, with one author suggesting “history is perpetually
suspicious of memory” (Nora 1989, 9). Life writing does contribute to our understand­
ing of history and leadership through a detailed observation of events as seen through
an individual lens. Just as an historian’s reconstruction of past events is informed by
their assumptions of the present (Cavalier 2005, 6), autobiography is “ideographic”
research – a subjective, individual account that is, of necessity, more or less biased
in the author’s favour. Such “thick”, descriptive accounts offer a unique perspective
for a researcher interested in how politics works and how power is wielded (Walter
2009, 97). Like ethnography, it can “capture the meaning of everyday human activi­
ties” (Hammersley and Atkinson cited by Rhodes 2006, 47), and contribute to the store
of knowledge by relating the actions, the thoughts and the patterns of one political
actor’s life.

Autobiography in Political Science

Political scientists who use an historical framework as a basis for their research
find autobiographies useful for providing context. Barack Obama’s Dreams from my
Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), was ground breaking in terms of it
being a first person account of someone who identified with two conflicting worlds:
the American son of a black African, who ultimately would move to the very centre
of power (Baillie 2011, 319). Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994) informed
us of what Mandela considered important attributes of successful leadership and
explains much about his presidency. Mandela’s writing on reconciliation, forgiveness
and citizenship in the new South Africa post-apartheid is an exemplar of the autobi­
ographical genre. While didactic in approach, Mandela’s writing has been translated
into six African languages and made into a children’s book. It offered a code of citizen­
ship, and has inspired others. For example journalist Antjie Krog’s Country of my skull
(1998) recalled her reaction to the witness statements of people who suffered during
apartheid (Smith and Watson 2010, 134). Their testimonies to the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission are an example of the role oral history can have in the
political process. Talking truth to power has resulted in changes to government policy
across the world. In Australia, indigenous peoples received an apology for the “stolen
generation”, while the testimony of Holocaust survivors assisted in the creation of
refugee policies.
More than any other subset of the autobiographical genre, political diaries provide
immediate, first-person insights into politics, the policy process and certain person­
alities at a particular point in time. Two exemplars are Richard Crossman’s Diaries of
124 1 Theoretical Approaches

a Cabinet Minister (1979) in the United Kingdom and Neal Blewett’s A Cabinet Diary
(1999) in Australia. In the case of Crossman, his record provides a vivid account of the
life of a minister and the inner workings of Whitehall. Written with a view to “stripping
the legend” to provide a truthful account (Crossman cited in Theakston 2003, 20),
his ultimately posthumous contribution was the subject of a concerted (but unsuc­
cessful) effort by the Secretary to the Cabinet and the Attorney-General to prevent its
publication. Neal Blewett’s ministerial diary is a snap-shot of a brief period of time in
Australian politics. Both diaries were written by former academics turned politicians,
both written with the intention of communicating how politics is played out, and to
draw attention to the iterative nature of policy design.
Most political actors find it difficult to routinely record events as they unfold.
The very act of writing a diary makes the author less a participant, more an observer
(Smith and Watson, 2010, 1). Few politicians and senior bureaucrats even try. This is
due to a number of factors including ethical issues around Cabinet solidarity, caution
about personal revelation, time constraints, the physical exhaustion that comes at the
end of a long day, loyalty to friends and colleagues, the risk of libel, and the awareness
that they could be used against the writer. One need look no further than US Treasury
official Joshua Steiner, whose diary was used by those seeking to find evidence of
wrongdoing by the Clintons in the ‘Whitewater controversy’ (concerning a failed real
estate venture of the Clintons prior to his presidency) to understand why (Laboton
1994). In his testimony to Congress, Steiner stated, “I made no attempt to be inaccu­
rate, but I want to be clear I was not attempting to be precise. I made no attempt to
check the accuracy of this diary” (Simon 1994). Despite issues of truth and motivation
being raised over some diaries (for Australia see Latham 2005), they have a freshness
and immediacy that other forms of life writing cannot replicate.
Memoirs (not diaries) from staffers seem to be proliferating. These memoirs about
times serving the powerful can be problematic; with blurred ethical boundaries par­
ticularly relating to confidentiality. As James Button’s Speechless (2012) notes about
his time in Australia’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, those that work
for government know “the companion of insider knowledge is confidentiality: the
more you see, the less you say” (2013, 225). Button was not to know that deposed
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would be returned to office in late June 2013. However,
his assessment of Rudd’s managerial style does not so much provide new insights
into the working style of one Prime Minister, as provide further evidence as to why
his colleagues may have removed him from office in the first place. Whether such an
assessment of a serving Prime Minister could influence the outcome of future polit­
ical contests, is uncertain. Nevertheless, as Weller (1984, 133) observes, diaries “are
the place where facts, rumours, motives and intrigue all compete for space”. A diary,
written at the time, without the advantage of retrospective analysis and without an eye
to posterity can tell us much about the grit and grind of day to day politics.
Political scientists are trained to recognise the risks of subjectivity and accept the
inherent bias in personal accounts. Every document, first person account, memoir
 1.13 Political Science 125

and diary is subjective. Circumspection is thus a crucial part of using the material.
When cross-checked against other sources including the conflicting or corroborat­
ing accounts of other actors and triangulated with sources such as official records,
Hansard, oral histories and secondary sources, diaries and autobiographies contrib­
ute toward a deeper understanding of political events, causality and policy decisions.
Yet despite these advantages it seems that the field of mainstream political science
remains dismissive of the life-writing genre (Rhodes 2006, 43). A cynical interpretation
may be that this is due to its perceived popularity. Political biography, autobiography
and memoir sell better than any other form of political inquiry (Arklay 2006; Yagoda
2009). They provide an accessible account, and sometimes a tantalising glimpse of
events and personalities (even if at times they are difficult to believe). Alan Clark’s
experience as a member of Thatcher’s government is one example. As Marr (2000)
noted “Alan Clark’s Diaries reveal him as a raconteur, a roué… and a fascist. Thank
heavens no one took him too seriously”. Still the view persists that if ‘ordinary’ people
enjoy reading these stories from the political trenches then it cannot be serious schol­
arship. Perhaps that is why Australian historian Geoffrey Bolton (2006, 1) ironically
noted that “real intellectuals do not do political biography”. Is such scepticism justi­
fied? Certainly there are weaker and stronger examples of the genre, with hagiography
(where subjects are treated with undue reverence) just one of the potential pitfalls.
Autobiographies or memoirs written with an eye to disparage a disliked colleague
may earn lucrative rewards (huge advances are often proffered by publishers). Rarely
do autobiographies include anyone else’s accounts of events. Critics of autobiography
would argue the genre lacks rigour and fails to provide value-free insights into human
behaviour.
In its defence, auto/biographical research was never intended to support val­
ue-free generalisations. It is idiographic research, inductive, sensitive to context, able
to provide “thick”, detailed description which while limited in its scope has the poten­
tial to provide readers with a “feel for another’s social reality” (Neuman 1997, 71). In
this way it is similar to the use of narratives in organisational research. There is an
emerging scholarship that views story-telling and narratives as valuable in providing
a deeper understanding of workplaces. Diaries and memoirs can also contribute to
that understanding.
One only has to look at a political scientist’s book-shelf to observe that political
auto/biographies are read by the profession. But do they inform their research? The
results from an informal survey among political scientists in Australia, Britain, Canada
and the USA indicate that the genre informs political science research in various ways
by providing an insider account of historical events, articulating different views on
leadership, shedding light on how individuals grapple with various problems they
confront in office, and in highlighting how different leaders view their role – how
they become reflexive. Auto/biographies are used by academics interested in political
psychology and/or leadership typologies as instances of the ‘life myth’ scholars may
try to penetrate.
126 1 Theoretical Approaches

Limitations of the Genre

The motivations for writing an autobiography are varied. A writer may try to engage
the reader through amusing anecdotes and character analysis of other well-known
colleagues as is often the case in memoirs. Hence Paul Hasluck’s A Chance of Poli-
tics sketch portrait of Australian Prime Minister William MacMahon told of a man
whom the author found “contemptible” (1997, 185). Autobiographies can also serve to
justify actions taken during a career or to provide a salve to the author’s conscience
by explaining some of the hard, controversial and unpopular decisions that are taken
in the course of a political life. Yet, if the final account tries to rewrite history, is either
unfair or too generous, or is otherwise lacking in its assessment, it is likely to be coun­
tered by others who will happily set the record straight. Most authors recognise this. It
is one constraining factor. Of more significance perhaps is who gets published. In the
main it is the leaders or those close to power; less often it is the rebels and the radicals.
In that regard, autobiography reflects the old adage, ‘history is written by the victors’.
The privileged position of those in power is reflected in whose auto/biographies get
published.
Auto/biography is a growing field. Well written, thoughtful accounts – be they
autobiographies, diaries or memoirs – provide insight into how public policy is made.
They demonstrate the negotiations and compromises that are integral to governing,
and provide an insider’s perspective of political events and controversies. So we learn
from reading the account by US president Bill Clinton’s staffer George Stephanopou­
los that the President he served was a man of “seductive powers” who was quick to
anger and who affected staff like “an impersonal physical force” (Harris, 1999). The
diaries of Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alistair Campbell outline the deals, bargains, and
reactions as Blair dealt with war, death and resignations. His diary also reveals the
international friendships that occur in politics such as when Australian Prime Minis­
ter Paul Keating advised Blair about how to handle Rupert Murdoch: “He’s a big bad
bastard, and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he thinks you can
be a big bad bastard too… the only language he respects is strength” (2007, 74). From
James Button (2013, 219) we learn something of the difficulties speech writers have in
finding the voice of the leader, as well as something about the management style of
individual leaders.
In Australia and the UK it is still relatively rare for political staffers and public
servants to pen their thoughts. Those that do so understand the risk they take. Paul
Keating for example has never forgiven his former speech writer Don Watson for his
reflection on Keating’s time in office, viewing it as an “unforgivable betrayal” (Button
2013, 219). In America such writings are more commonplace. Contemporary exam­
ples include Stephanopoulos’ account of Clinton in his All too human (1999), David
Stockman’s book on his experiences during Reagan’s administration The Triumph of
politics (1986) and Madeline Albright’s account Madam Secretary (2003) which recalls
her time as the first US Secretary of State. Her book contains candid accounts of both
 1.13 Political Science 127

the personal and political difficulties that she faced in getting through the selection
process, doing the job, as well as frank accounts of other political personalities she
encountered (Albright 2003, 221). Aide to President Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal (2003,
434), tells us that facing the daily trials that beset the Clinton Administration was
tough: “I had to put on a suit of armor every morning and keep it fastened all day
long”. In Western democracies the paper trail is being shortened as the realities of the
digital age, the 24 hour news cycle and a more litigious working environment mean
Administrations are increasingly shunning “paper or e-mail records of their daily
deliberations” (Dallek 2003).
In short auto/biography is read by many political scientists and used by some in
order to gain a first-hand account of politics from a particular vantage point in time.
The well-written ones can highlight broader issues and explore the beliefs and reasons
that underpin political actions. At their best, they reveal the dynamics of political
engagement: why it mattered to the author, and perhaps, why it should also matter to
the rest of us. Political scientists understand the need to view autobiography with a
critical eye, to interpret the writings in terms of their accessibility, authenticity, cred­
ibility and explanatory power (Roberts 2002, 6, 37–40). While they should never be
used in isolation, auto/biography is one important element in the political scientists’
tool-kit.

Works Cited
Albright, Madeleine. Madam Secretary: a memoir. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Arklay, Tracey. “Political Biography: Its Contribution to Political Science.” Australian Political Lives.
Chronicling political careers and administrative histories. Ed. Tracy Arklay, John Nethercote and
John Wanna. Canberra: ANU e-press, 2006. 13–24.
Baillee, Justine. “From Margin to Centre: Postcolonial Identities and Barack Obama’s Dreams from
my Father.” Life Writing 8.3 (2011): 317–329.
Blewett, Neal. A Cabinet Diary. South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1999.
Blumenthal, Sidney. The Clinton Wars. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Brewer, Mary. “Politics and Life Writing.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing Autobiographical and Bio-
graphical Forms. Vol. II. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. 721.
Bolton, Geoffrey. “The Art of Australian Political.” Australian Political Lives. Chronicling political
careers and administrative histories. Ed. Tracy Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna. Can-
berra: ANU e-press, 2006. 1–12.
Button, James. Speechless, a year in my father’s business. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
2013.
Campbell, Alastair. The Blair Years: extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries. Ed. Alastair Camp-
bell and Richard Stott. London: Hutchinson, 2007.
Cavalier, Rodney. “A Consideration of the Value of Diaries with Occasional Reference to the Efforts of
Mark Latham.” Australian Quarterly 77.5 (2005): 4–14.
Clark, Alan. Diaries 1983–1992. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993.
Denzin, Norman, and Yvonne Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage,
2nd ed. 2000.
128 1 Theoretical Approaches

Dallek, Robert. “The Clinton Wars! The President’s Man.” The New York Times. 18 May 2003. http://
www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/books/review/18DALLEKT.html (11 July 2018).
Harris, John. “Stephanopoulos Book Tests Loyalty.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/
politics/special/clinton/stories/clinton030899.htm (11 July 2018).
Hasluck, Paul. The Chance of Politics. Melbourne: Text Publishers, 1997.
Kearney, Richard. On Stories. London: Routledge, 2002.
Laboton, Stephen. “Treasury Official is Disavowing Whitewater details in his diary.” http://www.
nytimes.com/1994/07/26/us/treasury-official-is-disavowing-whitewater-details-in-his-diary.
html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (15 November 2017).
Latham, Mark. The Latham Diaries. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005.
Marr, Andrew. “Pooter in Parliament.” The Observer. 15 October 2000.
Nora, Pierre. “Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire. Representations (1989).” Hand-
book of Qualitative Research. Ed. Denzin Norman and Yvonne Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage,
2nd ed. 2000. 7–26.
Rhodes, Carl, and Andrew Brown. “Narrative, organizations and research.” International Journal of
Management Reviews 7.3 (2005): 167–188.
Rhodes, Rod A. W. “Expanding the Repertoire: Theory, Method and Language in Political Biography.”
Australian Political Lives. Chronicling political careers and administrative histories. Ed. Tracy
Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna. Canberra: ANU e-press, 2006. 43–50.
Rhodes, Rod A. W. “Theory, Method and British Political Life History.” Political Studies Review 10
(2012): 161–176.
Roberts, Brian. Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002.
Scalmer, Scean, and Nathan Hollier. “I, Diarist: Examining Australia Politics from the ‘Inside’.”
­Australian Journal of Politics and History 55.2 (2009): 170–189.
Simon, Roger. “Diary that could be denied would be called a liary.” http://articles.baltimoresun.
com/1994-08-07/news/1994219036_1_dear-diary-joshua-steiner-diary-full (11 July 2018).
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2nd ed. 2010.
Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human – A Political Education. Boston: Little Brown and Company,
1999.
Stockman, David. The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. New York: Harper &
Row, 1986.
Theakston, Kevin. “Richard Crossman: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister.” Public Policy and Adminis-
tration 18.20 (2003): 20–40.
Vidich, Arthur J., and Stanford M. Lyman. “Qualitative Methods, Their History in Sociology and
Anthropology.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Denzin Norman and Yvonne Lincoln.
Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2nd ed. 2000. 37–84.
Walter, James. “Biographical Analysis.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership.
Ed. R.A.W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t Hart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Watson, Don. Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. A Portrait of Paul Keating. North Sydney: PM Vintage
Books/Random House, 2002.
Weller, Patrick. “The Politics of the Diarist. Book Review.” Politics 19.2 (1984): 133–34.
Woolf, Virgina. The Diary of Virgina Woolf. 1915–1919. Vol. I. New York: A Harvest Book, 1977.
Yagoda, Ben. Memoir – A History. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.
 1.13 Political Science 129

Further Reading
Jolly, Margaretta, ed. The Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms.
2 vols. London: Dearborn, 2001.
Pimlott, Ben. “The solace of doubt? Biographical methodology after the short Twentieth Century.”
Mapping lives: the uses of biography. Ed. Peter France and William St Clair. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004. 321–335.
Roberts, Brian. Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002.
1.14 Postcolonialism
Mita Banerjee

As a field comprising both literature and cultural theory, postcolonialism has a par­
ticular affinity for the autobiographical. In a particular, postcolonial mode of autobi­
ography, the writer’s own cultural past of having grown up in or shaped by a culture
dominated by British colonialism is mapped onto the body of the literary protagonist.
Just as the writer discovers, through fiction, an alternative cultural signification, the
protagonist discovers a way of emancipating himself or herself from the former colo­
nizer. Postcolonial literature as a genre thus comprises literatures from all parts of the
former British Empire, from Africa with seminal postcolonial writers such as Chinua
Achebe to India and the Caribbean.

Postcolonialism and “Writing the Nation”

The key texts which can be seen to have inaugurated the field of postcolonial litera­
ture, from George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) to Salman Rushdie’s Mid-
night’s Children (1980), take the founding metaphors of colonialism as their starting
points from which the literary protagonist – often a young boy or girl –, then goes on
to distance himself/herself to create his or her own, postcolonial signification. The
notion of adolescence as a form of personal, but also of political coming of age is by
no means accidental here. The rationale of the colonial political and cultural system
of domination, from its inception, was the idea that the colonizing nation as ‘mother
country’ was to watch over its ward, the colony, which was hence implied to be “‘unfit’
for self-government” (Jacobson 1998, 27); in this colonialist thinking, it was the “white
man’s burden”, as Rudyard Kipling once put it (1948, 55), to watch over those peoples
who could not (yet) govern themselves. Political dependence and economic exploita­
tion were thus explained and ‘naturalized’ through the metaphor of the family. What
this implied, of course, was the transvaluation of a system of exploitation into a form
of kinship in which the mother country lovingly watched over and decided for its colo­
nial children. Postcolonial literature could thus well be termed a ‘declaration of inde­
pendence’ in which the ‘children’ severed their bonds to their parents, and in which
they went to ‘unlearn’ the very ideas on which colonialism had been founded. From
the very beginning, postcolonial literature is a form of cultural and political rebirth.
Not incidentally, Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel, Midnight’s Children (1981),
starts both with the ‘birth’ of the Indian nation on August 15, 1947 and the birth of its
protagonist: “I was born […] on August 15th, 1947 […]. On the stroke of midnight […].
[At] the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the
world” (Rushdie 1980, 1). Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem, is thus “mysteriously hand­
cuffed to history” (1980, 3).

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 1.14 Postcolonialism 131

Postcolonialism thus encapsulates the practice of “writing the self” as “writing

the nation” (Kim et al. 1994, ix), a practice also discussed in the second major volume
by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (1990). As is evident
from the concept of writing the self as writing the nation, postcolonial literature uses
and expands the concept of Western autobiography. If Western autobiographies such
as Benjamin Franklin’s are based on an individual as a model for the citizen of the
nation to emulate, postcolonial writing conceives the relationship between the indi­
vidual and the community differently. For postcolonial writers from Salman Rushdie
to Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta, the individual is inseparable from the commu­
nity, or in Salman Rushdie’s words, “to understand just one life you have to swallow
the world” (1980, 147).
Postcolonial literature thus ‘writes’ the former colony into being as a nation in
its own right, and then describes – again based on the metaphor of a child’s growth
into adulthood – its coming of age as a nation. The metaphor of the colonial and
familial dependence of the former colony on the former mother country is turned by
postcolonial writers into a source of immense creativity, captured in Salman Rushdie’s
memorable phrase of the “empire [writing] back” to the center (1982, 8). Taken from
popular culture in a reference to George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy (1977), postcolonial
literature assumes a deliberately playful, irreverent mode toward the former colonizer.
It rehearses the process of coming of age which starts with the unthinking adoration
of the mother country and ends with a systematic process of abrogation and appro­
priation, in the course of which the colonial mind-set (based on the alleged inferiority
of colonial cultures as ‘primitive’) is rejected and replaced by alternative, postcolonial
epistemologies.
The literary practice which arises from the rejection of colonialism not only as a
form of political domination but also as a way of thinking is the practice of ‘writing
back’, of re-writing colonial narratives. Thus, Jean Rhys’s seminal novel, Wide Sar-
gasso Sea (1966) re-writes Charlotte Brontë’s canonical novel, Jane Eyre (1847), from
the perspective of the black Caribbean madwoman who, in Brontë’s narrative, is con­
veniently locked away in the attic. In Rhys’s rewriting of Brontë’s fiction, the ascrip­
tion of madness is unmasked as the colonist’s incomprehension of an alternative sig­
nification and as a dismissal of a culture not his own. Postcolonialism is thus also a
shifting of perspective, and a critical – and literary – practice that sets out to unearth
cultural legacies which have been submerged by British colonial power.
At the core of these postcolonial epistemologies, however, lies the problem that
there can be no straightforward rediscovery of pre-colonial forms of thought; instead,
postcolonial epistemologies are in themselves hybrid in that they incorporate parts of
the former colonial system. The language in which they do so, moreover, is the lan­
guage of the former colonizer; the hybridity of the postcolonial text is thus both cul­
tural and linguistic. Given the metaphor of the postcolonial nation cutting the chord to
its colonial ‘parent’, many postcolonial end with their youthful protagonists’ standing
on the brink of adulthood. From this vantage point, they contemplate a future that is
132 1 Theoretical Approaches

yet uncertain: The challenge for the postcolonial nation, of course, is to do better than
its parent.

Postcolonial Theory and the Agency of the

‘Subaltern’
It is this epistemological challenge which has been addressed by postcolonial theory,
led originally by the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Gayatri
Spivak and Edward Said (Young 1995, 163). More than many other fields, postcoloni­
alism has been characterized by a close affinity between postcolonial literature and
postcolonial theory. Theorists like Homi Bhabha spell out, on a theoretical plane, the
textual and cultural manoeuvres that postcolonial literature performs in its abroga­
tion of colonial knowledge systems. The solution which Homi Bhabha provides for the
dilemma of a postcolonial ‘rediscovery’ of a culture affected by colonial domination is
a deliberately flawed equation. Bhabha writes, “the transformational value of change
lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One […] nor
the Other […] but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of
both” (1994, 28).
Central for postcolonial theory has been the concept of the ‘subaltern’. Rooted,
in the case of Gayatri Spivak, in Marxist historiography and the work of the subaltern
studies group around the Indian historian Ranajit Guha, postcolonial theorists inves­
tigate in particular the concept of the agency of the postcolonial subject with regard
to dominant structures of hearing. Thus, in Spivak’s memorable formation, “the sub­
altern […] cannot speak” (1994, 287) because the words she utters are not part of the
epistemological spectrum which the hegemonic culture can hear. The category of the
‘subaltern’, moreover, holds a class dimension as much as a cultural one. Thus, Spi­
vak’s work in particular has investigated the ways in which the colonial power often
collaborated with, and used for its own purposes, intra-cultural forms of domination,
such as the Indian caste-system.
As is evident in Spivak’s work, postcolonial theory is thus especially concerned
with the power of colonial or hegemonic discourse. In this concern, postcolonial
theory is indebted to postmodernist and deconstructionist thinking, especially to the
work of Michel Foucault. Postcolonial theory thus has a strong affinity to postmod­
ernism. It is this close connection between postcolonialism and postmodernism which
led Anthony Appiah to ask playfully in his 1991 article, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism
the Post- in Postcolonial?” (Appiah 1991, 336). Based on Foucault’s critique of knowl­
edge systems, Edward Said laid the groundwork for postcolonial studies through his
1978 study, Orientalism, in which he insists that writers as diverse as Johann Wolfgang
Goethe and Gustave Flaubert converge in their “othering” of an “Oriental” culture
whose ability to represent itself they systematically deny (Said 1978, 6–7). What Said
 1.14 Postcolonialism 133

adds to the concept of ‘postcolonial abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’, then, is a cri­

tique of colonial dominance as systemic in its discursive and epistemological denial
of the colonial culture. There is to postcolonial theory an epistemological as well as
a political agenda. Like postcolonial literary authors, the rhetorical verve with which
postcolonial theorists deconstruct the dominant discourse is informed by their root­
edness in specific, postcolonial cultures. In Said’s work especially, there are strong
autobiographical elements, as his critique emanates from his own subject position
as a Palestinian with a Christian name having grown up in an Islamic culture. As
he writes in his autobiography, Out of Place (1999): “It took me about fifty years to
become accustomed to, or, more exactly, to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward,’ a
foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said”
(Said 2000, 3). As these considerations show, the autobiographical is central to the
politics of the postcolonial. Live experience, the experience of colonialism on both a
personal and a collective level, is at the core of postcolonial writing and theory. In this
vein, postcolonial autobiographies have driven home with a vengeance the fact that
the personal is always political; that the impact of a given system can best be gauged
by the traces it leaves on individual lives.
Similarly to Said’s, Salman Rushdie’s autobiographical work, Joseph Anton (2012),
adds yet another layer to the intersection between life-writing and postcolonialism.
In his memoir, Rushdie looks back at what it meant to live under the ‘fatwa’, writing
under the name which the death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini had
condemned him to use during his life in hiding: Joseph Anton. Rushdie’s own life has
thus illustrated the pitfalls which may accompany both postcolonialism and postcolo­
nial life writing. Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, had drawn on the hybridity
and deliberate cultural “impurity” which marked the author’s own biography. This
was a hybridity which virtually all of Rushdie’s characters cherish; yet, it was these
characters’ alleged lack of respect for Islamic religion which in 1989 earned the author
of The Satanic Verses a death sentence. Joseph Anton can thus also be read as an affir­
mation of the legitimacy, and the necessity, of postcolonial writing in its exposing the
fundamentalisms of our time.
Like postcolonial literary authors, postcolonial theorists have celebrated the
hybridity and irreverent syncretism of their own lives, which they proceed to turn
from a curse into a benefit: In his later work, Edward Said uses his love of music and
his friendship with Jewish composer Daniel Barenboim (Barenboim and Said 2004) as
a reference to what his fellow theorist, Homi Bhabha, has called the space “outside the
sentence” (1994, 180): a transcultural space in which discourses of purity and colonial
authority will no longer hold. At the heart of Said’s work – and the basis for the criti­
cism which his oeuvre has sometimes been subjected to – lies the paradox of the post­
colonial. If indeed the postcolonial subject who has now come of age is to live a life
unencumbered by the past, what may this alternative be constituted by? Thus, critics
have argued that in Said’s work, from Orientalism to its sequel, Culture and Imperi-
alism (1994), the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse is much more pronounced
134 1 Theoretical Approaches

than the reinscription of alternative, postcolonial forms of signification. This fixation

on the former colonizer has been seen by most critics as an impasse or dead end
inherent in postcolonialism itself. If the concept of ‘writing back’ gave rise to innu­
merable re-writings of colonial novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966),
the practice of writing back ultimately served to reinforce the presence and influence
of the former colonizer. What, many critics proceeded to ask, lay beyond the postco­
lonial (Loomba 2005, 1)? One of the fields which have recently arisen in this context is
the use of postcolonial theory to describe the former Soviet Empire. Thus, critics such
as David Chioni Moore have reformulated Appiah’s above-mentioned question to ask
whether “the Post- in Postcolonial [is] the Post- in Post-Soviet” (2001, 118). It remains
to be seen whether the narratives written after the demise of communism as a master
narrative will have similar emplotments, describing in their turn the coming of age of
former communist countries. After the waning of postcolonial rewritings of canoni­
cal works and canonical authors (such as Ania Loomba’s Postcolonial Shakespeares
[1998]), postcolonial theory has been most productively used in the interrogation of
hegemonic political systems coming to an end (most notably, South Africa after apart­
heid) as well as in exploring different forms of neo-colonialism. Despite the fact that
colonialism took different forms in various parts of the globe, postcolonialism stresses
that these forms of domination may nevertheless have strikingly similar discourses
and cultural practices at their core. Yet, one of the most controversial ideas in this
context has been, whether the label of ‘postcolonialism’ in fact dismisses continuing
legacies of the former empire as well as neo-colonial forms of domination. More-
over, the applicability of postcolonial theory to the history and cultural production of
indigenous communities such as Native Americans in the US has also been a point
of disagreement. Arguably, for communities dispossessed of the land they were the
original inhabitants of, colonialism is by no means ‘past’.

Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. New York: Anchor Books, 1969.
Appiah, Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2
(1991): 336–357.
Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward Said. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations on Music and Society.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847). London: Penguin, 2006.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Kim, Elaine, and Norma Alarcon, eds. Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. San Francisco: Third Women Press, 1994.
Kiping, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden.” Sixty Poems (1899). London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1948. 55–57.
 1.14 Postcolonialism 135

Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin (1953). Harlow: Longman, 1988.

Loomba, Ania. Post-colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Loomba, Ania, and Jed Esty, eds. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press,
2005.
Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Towards a Global Post­
colonial Critique.” PMLA 116:1 (2001): 118–128.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). New York: Penguin, 2012.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Penguin, 1980.
Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes back with a Vengeance.” Times. 3 July 1982. 8.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses (1988). New York: Random House, 2008.
Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Said, Edward. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage, 2000.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Muticulturalism and the Media. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313.
Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Further Reading
Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds. Postcolonialism and Autobiography. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1998.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
1.15 Psychology
Rüdiger F. Pohl

Psychology is the science that studies human behavior and experience. It aims to
explain how and why humans act in certain ways and how and why they experience
the world in certain ways. With such knowledge, psychology seeks to accomplish
diagnosis, prognosis, and improvement of human behavior and experience. Psy­
chology assumes that human behavior and experience are shaped by an interaction
between genetically and experientially acquired regularities. Above that, each person
has his or her own developmental trajectory depending on one’s genetic potential
and according environmental influences. Psychology thus seeks to understand what
is common to all humans and what is specific to individuals.
Psychology is split into several sub-disciplines the most important of which are
(a) the basic disciplines of biological psychology, cognitive psychology, developmen­
tal psychology, social psychology, differential and personality psychology, psycho­
logical and statistical methods, and (b) the applied disciplines of clinical psychology
(including psychopathology and psychotherapy), educational psychology, work and
industrial psychology, and consumer psychology. Historical roots of psychology can
be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers (most notably, Plato and his student
Aristotle), but the current conception as a science was devised only recently, namely
late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. Some of the major influences
were the growing industrialization and urbanization (with all their challenges for indi­
viduals and the society as a whole), the emphasis on experimental research (as the
main road to gain insight), the decoupling of psychology from philosophy, and the
information-processing approach (causing the ‘cognitive turn’ in the 1960s).
The objects of scrutiny here, autobiography and autofiction, are not genuine
concepts in psychological research. They can nevertheless be viewed from several
of the psychological sub-disciplines. In the following, the main viewpoints, namely
cognitive, socio-developmental, and clinical psychology, will be sketched. In these
three domains, researchers have collected data and developed theories that relate to
autobiography and autofiction.

Cognitive Perspective
Cognitive psychology encompasses the areas of perception, learning, memory, lan­
guage, thinking, motivation, and emotion (Eysenck and Keane 2010; Groome 2012).
Most relevant questions with respect to autobiography and autofiction concern how
personal events are perceived, stored, and later retrieved from memory, and how
they are translated into a narrative format. These and other topics are covered by a
relatively young domain within cognitive psychology focusing on autobiographical

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-016
 1.15 Psychology 137

memory. Although the memory for one’s life had been a research object before, it
became an established field not until the 1990s (starting with Conway 1990), pushed
by a movement called ‘everyday psychology’ or ‘applied psychology’. Nowadays,
autobiographical memory has become a widespread and internationally renowned
research area and yielded a multitude of publications, ranging from basic cognitive
processes to clinical applications. In the following, the main findings will be summa­
rized (Pohl 2007).
Cognitive psychology distinguishes several long-term memory systems, espe­
cially declarative and non-declarative memory, with declarative memory being further
divided into semantic and episodic memory. Declarative systems involve those that
can be verbalized. Semantic memory includes all world knowledge that we acquired
in our lifetime, while episodic memory refers to all personal experiences that can be
localized in time and space. For example, remembering that Paris is the capital of
France refers to semantic memory, while remembering one’s last trip to Paris refers to
episodic memory.
Several authors set autobiographical memory equal to episodic memory (Tulving
1972), while others see autobiographical memory as more specialized (Pohl 2007).
The main criteria that are discussed for autobiographical memory are explicit self-ref­
erence, detailed (mostly visual) memory, accompanying thoughts and feelings, and
(more or less specific) knowledge about time and place of occurrence. Autobiographi­
cal remembering is often described as a process of subjective re-experiencing the orig­
inal event (‘mental time-travel’). Some specific types of autobiographical memories
consist of first-time experiences, highly emotional (up to traumatic) events, self-de­
fining episodes, and life-turning points (i. e. events or decisions with long-term conse­
quences). All these episodes can be considered ‘landmark events’ that help to struc­
ture one’s autobiography. In addition, two further systems are probably also involved
in organizing our autobiographical memories. The first system is a culture-specific
‘life-story schema’. Such a schema contains the typical (canonical) events that happen
to most persons at specific ages within a given culture (e. g. going to school, leaving
one’s parents, or getting married) as well as other, non-canonical events that could
happen to oneself but at rather unpredictable times (e. g. having an accident or start­
ing a new job). The second system that helps organizing autobiographical memo­
ries lies in the hierarchical principles of memory representations. For example, the
‘self-memory system’ has been proposed by Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) and
assumes three levels of organization. The top and most abstract level contains life­
time periods in our life, namely relationship themes and work themes, ordered in
time. For example, the relationship themes could contain ‘living with one’s parents’,
‘living with one’s friend X’, or ‘one’s marriage to Y’. Each of these periods contains a
number of general events on the medium level of the model. These general events are
mostly repeated experiences that are typical for certain periods in one’s life. Finally,
on the bottom and most specific level, the model assumes that we store event-specific
knowledge that contains all the details and sensory experiences associated with an
138 1 Theoretical Approaches

event. The model further assumes that in order to search our memory, we enter the
system either at the top or the bottom level and then (hopefully) progress from there
to the other levels.
In sum, autobiographical memory should not be considered a ‘mental diary’. It
is much more complex and flexible, but at the same time also more malleable (see
below).
Cognitive psychology also studies the processes leading to encoding (learning)
and retrieving (remembering) of personal experiences. In a nutshell, whether and how
specific experiences are encoded and stored in autobiographical memory depends
on a number of factors. These include the current goals of the experiencing person,
the dominant mood, the amount of attention, the amount of pre-existing knowledge,
the emotionality of the event, and the personal importance of the event. In addition,
quality of encoding and storage depends on the maturity of the brain, and thus the
developmental age of the person. Similarly manifold are the factors that determine
whether and how a stored memory can later be retrieved. Most important, of course,
is the quality of the original encoding and storage. Further factors include the quality
of the current retrieval cues (that drive memory search), the retention interval (i. e. the
time between encoding and retrieval), the amount of interim rehearsal of that experi­
ence, and the amount and strength of potentially interfering memories.
Generally, memory does not work like a video recorder storing all details of an
event in an authentic (objective) fashion. Rather, encoding, storing, and retrieval are
all subjectively governed processes that select, interpret, and abstract the original
information. For example, schematic knowledge is used to understand (and thus
store) the original event, as well as to retrieve and reconstruct it later on. As a con­
sequence, the retrieved memory most likely differs from the original event in several
aspects: Some parts are missing, while others are distorted or completely added.
These changes, however, usually remain unnoticed by us, because we do not have
the original record for comparison. Thus, our memories mostly appear veridical to
us. Only in cases with original records available (like e. g. in written diaries), we may
discover that our memories deviate from the original description.
With respect to autobiographical memories, several systematic distortions and
biases have been discovered. The sources of potential distortions can probably best
be understood when considering the functions of autobiographical remembering, that
is, by looking at the situations and goals that drive how we actually ‘use’ autobio­
graphical memories in our daily life. The functional perspective thus looks at the moti­
vational sources of remembering. Webster (1993) distinguished eight functions that
autobiographical memories could serve, namely ‘boredom reduction’, ‘death prepara­
tion’, ‘identity’, ‘problem-solving’, ‘conversation’, ‘intimacy maintenance’, ‘bitterness
revival’, and ‘teach/inform’. Later, Bluck (2003) argued for three functional catego­
ries, namely ‘self’, ‘social’, and ‘directive’. Webster as well as Bluck devised ques­
tionnaires to assess how strongly the proposed functions are indeed used. In a recent
paper, Harris, Rasmussen, and Berntsen (2013) proposed four functional categories
 1.15 Psychology 139

that could be considered a joint solution for the previous two approaches, containing
reflective, social, ruminative, and generative functions. Whatever the correct solution
may be, it is clear that the retrieval of autobiographical memories serves current goals
and that these goals accordingly govern the reconstruction process of remembering.
One of the main functions of autobiographical memories is the construction of one’s
self-concept, which in turn influences the way personal events are remembered. (This
discussion will be continued under the ‘developmental perspective’ below.) One of the
memory distortions in this domain concerns the ‘positivity bias’. This bias describes
the phenomenon that past experiences often appear more positive (or less negative)
than they originally were. This tendency, moreover, increases with age.
All these memory distortions or biases are considered to result from automatic
reconstruction processes that cannot be influenced deliberately. In other words, these
are not deliberate attempts, for example, to appear in a better light. The latter type of
consciously ‘editing’ one’s history (up to bluntly lying) may occur only later, namely
when someone talks (or writes) about his or her life. Then, for example, one may
feel inclined to omit more shameful events, exaggerate more successful ones, or even
invent completely new ones.
Writing one’s autobiography is the last topic under the ‘cognitive perspective’.
Given that memory retrieval already delivers a more or less biased version of one’s
autobiography, writing allows for far more flexible editing. Writing (like speaking) is
a way of communicating information to others. It consists of planning, writing, and
revising. More experienced writers devote more time to revising, less experienced ones
to writing. All communication processes follow certain, again culture-specific rules.
For example, Grice’s ‘cooperative principle’ (between speaker and listener) could be
seen as such a yardstick. Grice (1975) postulated, that communication should follow
four rules or principles, in order to be most efficient and effective. These rules concern
the maxim of quantity (‘Be as informative as required! Be neither too precise nor too
general!’), the maxim of quality (‘Try to be true! Don’t say what you believe to be
false! Don’t say something for which you lack adequate evidence!’), the maxim of
relation (‘Be relevant!’), and the maxim of manner (‘Be perspicuous! Avoid obscurity
and ambiguity! Be brief and orderly!’ etc.). However, the writings of people’s autobiog­
raphies mostly serve other and probably rather divergent goals. Such goals could be,
for example, to veridically document one’s life, to impress others, or to make money
by selling one’s autobiography. These goals, in turn, lead to further editing of one’s
life story as it is written down (see the functions described above).
Another source of potential influences lies in the fact that an autobiography rep­
resents a form of life narrative (Birren and Schroots 2006; Fivush and Haden 2003).
Narratives, in turn, typically conform to some rules or norms, for example, being
chronologically ordered, logical (or at least plausible), entertaining, or instructive.
Life narratives, moreover, appear coherent and reflective, including turning points
and major influences in one’s life. When people talk (or write) about their life, they
usually select such narrative forms to present their story. McAdams (1993, 2003, 2013)
140 1 Theoretical Approaches

assumed that we all are such ‘story tellers’ who strive for telling ‘good’ stories by
selecting, changing, or exaggerating the material we have about ourselves (see also
Kotre 1998).

Socio-developmental Perspective
In the past, psychological research of human development has mainly focused on
the first 20 years of life, describing the typical changes until one becomes an adult.
Nowadays, psychology rather seeks a life-span perspective on developmental changes
(Feldman 2011; Santrock 2011). These changes are typically categorized into different
domains, like ‘biological development’ (most importantly, changes in brain systems
and functioning), ‘cognitive development’ (incl. language, learning, thinking, and
memory), ‘socio-emotional development’, and ‘personality development’. Most
important for autobiography and autofiction are presumably the development and
functional role of one’s self-concept. Thus, the focus will be on the self and its role in
developing and maintaining identity.
In some of the life-span views of psychological development, humans are sup­
posed to be faced with a number of age-specific tasks (Havighurst 1948) or crises
(Erikson 1994) that need to be resolved in order to advance to the next developmental
stage. For example, Erikson proposed that everyone goes through eight consecutive
crises in his or her lifetime: Trust vs. mistrust (0–1 year), autonomy vs. shame and
doubt (1–3 y.), initiative vs. guilt (3–6 y.), industry vs. inferiority (6 y. –puberty), iden­
tity vs. role confusion (adolescence), intimacy vs. isolation (young adulthood), gen­
erativity vs. stagnation (middle adulthood), and ego integrity vs. despair (late adult­
hood). Obviously, most (if not all) of these crises concern one’s self-concept and one’s
socio-emotional relations to others. The most influential step in developing one’s
self-concept occurs in adolescence. Marcia (1966) described four stages a person may
be currently in while struggling with his or her identity: identity foreclosure, identity
diffusion, moratorium, and identity achievement. Depending on these stages, adoles­
cents are either strongly or weakly involved in exploring their personality, and make
either strong or weak commitments. With respect to autobiography, the first personal
life narrative (see above) is typically produced in emerging or early adulthood, after
having completed the identity formation task, in other words, after becoming an adult
(with rather stable personality features). Identity can be described as feeling person­
ally unique and sensing continuity across time (from the past over the present into
the future). The experienced identity comprises personal, political, religious, moral,
social, sexual, bodily, occupational, and other convictions and viewpoints.
The self can be viewed as a multifaceted knowledge set (Markus 1977). It consists,
for example, of a real, a possible, and an ought self. The real self contains a more
or less realistic assessment of one’s features and capabilities. The possible self con­
 1.15 Psychology 141

tains wishful or alternative selves. The ought self contains those features that others
(parents, teachers, friends, etc.) expect from someone. Greve (2000) summarized
the self-concept in a three-dimensional space. The dimensions are time (retrospec­
tive, current, prospective), modality (realistic, possible), and perspective (cognitive/
descriptive, emotional/evaluative).
Assuming a successful identity formation in adolescence, other crises may turn up
later in life. Levinson (1978), for example, postulated a ‘midlife-crisis’ that could occur
at the transitional period between early and middle adulthood (from 40 to 45 years).
(Another crisis could – according to his theory – occur later in life, that is, between
60 and 65 years.) The empirical evidence, however, is mixed and generally not sup­
portive. The reason is that crises represent non-canonical events that are mostly not
tied to any specific time period in life (e. g. becoming seriously ill, loosing one’s job,
getting divorced, etc.). Thus, crises may turn up at any time. A corresponding theo­
retical approach is the ‘life-events’ model (Cui and Vaillant 1996). According to that
model, the impact of potentially threatening events depends on a number of factors,
like the personal life-stage as well as the specific socio-historical context. Moreover, a
number of mediating variables (like physical and mental health, intelligence, income,
support, etc.) determine, to what degree such an event will really pose a threat und
whether and how it triggers according coping strategies.
When it comes to self-concept threatening events in our adult life, we obviously
possess a number of defensive mechanisms that strive for keeping our self-concept
stable. These threatening events may involve current or remembered ones. The
defense mechanisms contain processes like denial, avoidance, immunization, re-in­
terpretation, and others. Greenwald (1980) even postulated a ‘totalitarian ego’ that
governs our information processing in a self-serving way by putting ‘protective belts’
around our self-concept. As a consequence, we feel more stable and comfortable. A
second goal of such defensive mechanisms apparently consists in letting us see our
development as positive and generally improving. The already mentioned positivity
bias, for example, serves this end: We tend to remember positive events better than
negative ones, and remember them generally more positive than they were (except
extremely negative ones). The existence of these self-defending and self-serving
mechanisms raises an important normative question: How realistic should we assess
our current or past self? Or, in other words, how biased could our self-assessment
become before we run into serious trouble? Kotre (1998) postulated that we possess
two general mechanisms to solve this problem: One of them constantly strives to put
us in a better light (thus biasing the processing of present and past events), while the
other tries to preserve reality (the truth) as good as possible. Kotre referred to these two
as ‘myth-maker’ and ‘archivist’, respectively. Both are assumed to be similarly strong
and to continuously struggle against each other, but with neither one winning (except
under special circumstances). As a result, most self-perceptions and autobiographical
memories represent a mixture of both processes. In some cases, especially in written
autobiographies, the myth-maker might even win, which lead the Swiss author Martin
142 1 Theoretical Approaches

Suter to believe that “in einem Roman steckt mehr Wahrheit als in einer Autobiogra­
phie” [‘there is more truth to a novel than to an autobiography’] (WDR, 2002).
In older age, life-review processes play an increasingly important role (Staudinger
2001). Typically, such processes are triggered by seriously considering one’s death
(either in the face of potentially lethal illnesses or by getting closer to one’s life expec­
tancy). Erikson (1994) spoke of two crises in middle and late adulthood, namely ‘gen­
erativity vs. stagnation’ and ‘ego integrity vs. despair’, respectively. Both of these may
add to the need of a life review. Generativity concerns the desire to leave some sort
of legacy for the next generation. Most naturally, this includes one’s children (and
grand-children), but one might also think of more material types of legacy, like build­
ing a house, planting a tree, or writing an autobiography. Generativity in this sense
simply means that we want to ‘leave a mark’ beyond our death. In addition, ego integ­
rity (as goal of Erikson’s last crisis) involves thorough reflections and evaluations of
one’s life. These reflections may elicit new insights and even new goals for the remain­
ing lifetime. The outcome of the evaluation could be positive (possibly with the help
of the ‘myth-maker’) or negative. While the first outcome is (not surprisingly) related
to well-being in old age, the second one can lead to serious mental problems up to
committing suicide (the rate of which increases for men over 65 years old).

Clinical Perspective
Clinical psychology focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of human psychopathol­
ogy (Kring et al. 2012). In this section, memory disorders that may affect autobiogra­
phy and autofiction will be in the focus. Most of these involve disorders of memory
retrieval in one way or another. Finally, a short look will be taken at psychotherapy
and how it handles truth.
Changes in the way autobiographical memories are retrieved are related to current
mental states. Generally, we remember those events better that fit our current state
than those that do not. For example, when we experienced an event in a certain mood,
we will remember that event better when we are in the same mood again. A highly
common mood disorder, especially in old age, is depression. Depression is charac­
terized by a general feeling of dejectedness, including loss of emotionality, loss of
affective responding, and loss of motivation. Recall of autobiographical events of
depressed patients includes fewer positive events and more general episodes than
the recall of healthy patients. Some authors even see the rather general memories as
a defining symptom of depression.
Amnesia refers to the loss of memory, either caused by organic traumata (due,
for example, to injuries, virus infection, intoxication, or brain atrophy) or by psycho­
genic traumata (due, for example, to extreme emotional stress). The memory disor­
ders based on organic traumata are referred to as ‘amnestic disorders’, while those
 1.15 Psychology 143

based on psychogenic traumata are referred to as ‘dissociative disorders’. A further

distinction is made with respect to the affected time period of amnesia: Retrograde
amnesia concerns problems of retrieving earlier encoded memories, while antero­
grade amnesia concerns problems of storing new experiences in long-term memory.
In retrograde amnesia, usually only episodic memories are affected, while semantic
and procedural memories are intact. The affected time period extends from the trau­
matic event into the immediate or distant past (i. e. from minutes to years). Generally,
retrograde amnesia is reversible, so that memories will eventually return after some
time (i. e. hours to months), except for the time period immediately preceding the
traumatic event. Similarly, anterograde amnesia can be differently strong and revers­
ible. Interestingly, there is only a low correlation between retrograde and anterograde
amnesia, suggesting that different brain mechanisms are responsible for the two types
of amnesia. A typical disorder following organic traumata is the amnestic syndrome.
It consists of a strong and mostly irreversible anterograde amnesia and possibly a
retrograde amnesia to a varying extent. The intelligence of amnestic patients is intact.
The specific symptoms depend on the exact location of the brain injury. For example,
patients with frontal lobe amnesia tend to produce confabulations, that is, they tell
fantastic (but unreal) stories about their life. Moreover, these stories are not remem­
bered, so that new stories are produced over and over again.
Problems with one’s memory also arise from getting older, because several brain
functions become less efficient in old age, leading to slower information processing,
word-finding problems, lower working-memory capacity, and larger interference sus­
ceptibility. Apart from these rather normal problems, severe memory problems arise
from degenerative brain diseases as found in different types of dementia (the most
prominent of which is the Alzheimer’s disease). Dementia not only affects all cognitive
domains (like memory, language, and thinking), but also one’s motor functions as
well as one’s personality. The prevalence rate of dementia is about 1 % for 60-year olds
and then continuously increases with age. The rate for 90-year olds is already about
30 %. So far, there is no cure for dementia and it is lethal after 8–10 years. Dementia
is difficult to diagnose in its first years, because symptoms are often confused with
rather typical changes in old age. Thus, dementia will most often be diagnosed not
until several years after its onset.
Dissociative disorders (based on psychogenic traumata) mostly involve only retro­
grade amnesia. These disorders are further subdivided into dissociative amnesia, dis­
sociative fugue (flight), and dissociative identity disorder. All these disorders center
on problems with one’s autobiographical memory. In dissociative amnesia, which
often emerges as part of a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), memory failures are
often localized, that is, concern a specific period of time in one’s life (from days to
years). These failures are mostly reversible. The dissociative fugue is characterized
by a complete retrograde amnesia concerning one’s whole life. These patients expe­
rienced some sort of traumatic event that caused them to flee not only the current
situation but also their whole life. As a consequence, they lost their identity and are
144 1 Theoretical Approaches

thus accordingly disoriented. Usually, autobiographical memory returns after some

time (hours to years), but in some cases it does not and patients are forced to develop
a new identity. A dissociative identity disorder may be seen as the strongest disorder
in this domain. It involves the gradual development of multiple identities within the
same person. The triggering traumatic event typically occurs in childhood, but the
disorder does not appear until early adulthood, that is, the normal phase of identity
formation (see above). This disorder is generally chronic, but may lessen in older age.
All these dissociative disorders can be seen as protective mechanisms that keep us
from remembering painful or emotionally stressful events.
This section closes with a few remarks on the question of truthfulness of auto­
biographical memories in the context of psychotherapy. As a witness in court, one
would, of course, wish to have a perfect and truthful memory, but as a patient in
psychotherapy, the situation is different. First of all, the patient may not know the
truth, so there would be no need to engage various memory-enhancing techniques
(like intensive questioning, hypnosis, regression, or psychiatric drugs). Secondly, the
current ‘truth’, that is, the way the patient understands his or her life right now may be
more important than the historical truth for an effective psychotherapy. Accordingly,
several clinical approaches not only work with the patient’s current life story, but also
with dream work or even future fantasies. The main goals typically are to strengthen
the patient’s self (see above) and to re-integrate conflicting episodes into his or her
life story. Thus, in a way, psychotherapy is also a way of changing one’s autobiogra­
phy, adding new interpretations and evaluations. This happens not necessarily in the
sense of a ‘myth-maker’ (see above), but more in the sense of providing alternative
views (and potentially new ‘memories’), thereby allowing the patient to qualify his or
her past experiences.

Summing Up
This chapter outlined the basics of cognitive, socio-developmental, and clinical psy­
chology as they relate to personal identity and the encoding and recall of autobio­
graphical memories. Most of these basics refer to the regular processes that determine
how events are perceived, stored, and later retrieved from memory; some others refer
to clinical cases when influences are too strong to allow regular processing of infor­
mation. In sum, one accumulates experiences throughout one’s lifetime, thus shaping
one’s identity which in turn determines what kind of experiences one will make. The
current self-concept represents a sort of glasses through which one sees one’s past.
As a consequence, one’s life appears in retrospect more coherent and integrated than
it probably was.
Autobiography, or more precisely one’s told or written life narrative, reflects a
number of different processes that are related to regular memory characteristics and
 1.15 Psychology 145

functional goals. The according influences may take diverse forms from (presuma­
bly unconscious and automatic) autofiction up to intentional lying. Autofiction could
also be seen as a form of lying, namely ‘lying to oneself’, but it is suggested here to
distinguish it from lying to others, because in the latter case, the goals of writing an
autobiography may lead to forms of ‘editing’ that are rather conscious and intentional
and therefore could be avoided if one wished to. This option is not available for the
former cases of memory distortions.

Works Cited
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Feldman, Robert S. Development across the life span. Boston: Prentice Hall, 6th ed. 2011.
Fivush, Robyn, and Catherine A. Haden, eds. Autobiographical memory and the construction of a
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memory: An integrative approach.” Memory (2013). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/
10.1080/09658211.2013.806555#.UxmB7YVjDJ8 (11 July 2018).
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146 1 Theoretical Approaches

Markus, Hazel. “Self-schemata and processing information about the self.” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 35.2 (1977): 63–78.
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Further Reading
Alea, Nicole, and Qi Wang. “Going global: The functions of autobiographical remembering in cultural
context.” Memory 23.1 (2015): 1–10.
Berntsen, Dorthe, ed. Understanding autobiographical memory: Theories and approaches. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Bluck, Susan. “Going global: Functions of autobiographical remembering world tour.” Memory 23.1
(2015): 111–118.
Draaisma, Douwe. Why life speeds up as you get older: How memory shapes our past. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Habermas, Tilman, and Christin Köber. “Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers
the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity.” Memory 23.5 (2015):
664–674.
Hallford, David J., David Mellor, and Robert A. Cummins. “Adaptive autobiographical memory in
younger and older adults: The indirect association of integrative and instrumental reminiscence
with depressive symptoms.” Memory 21.4 (2013): 444–457.
Nourkova, Veronika, Daniel M. Bernstein, and Elizabeth F. Loftus. “Biography becomes autobiogra-
phy: Distorting the subjective past.” American Journal of Psychology 117.1 (2004): 65–80.
Rubin, David C. “The basic-systems model to episodic memory.” Perspectives on Psychological
Science 1.4 (2006): 277–311.
Markowitsch, Hans J., and Harald Welzer. The development of autobiographical memory. Hove:
Psychology Press, 2009.
Tekcan, Ali I., Burcu Kaya-Kizilöz, and Handan Odaman. “Life scripts across age groups: A compari-
son of adolescents, young adults, and older adults.” Memory 20.8 (2012): 836–847.
Urbanowitsch, Nadja, Lina Gorenc, Christina J. Herold, and Johannes Schröder. “Autobiographical
memory: A clinical perspective.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7.194 (2013): 1–6.
 1.15 Psychology 147

Watson, Lynn A., and Dorthe Berntsen, eds. Clinical perspectives on autobiographical memory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Wolf, Tabea, and Daniel Zimprich. “Differences in the use of autobiographical memory across the
adult lifespan.” Memory 23.8 (2015): 1238–1254.
1.16 Psychoanalysis
Christine Kirchhoff and Boris Traue

Whether the past is constructed or re-constructed, merely narrated or precisely

accounted for, whether it is a truth or a myth to be destroyed – such questions are
discussed in literary studies, historical sciences, the social sciences as well as psy­
choanalysis. These disciplines each have something different to add to the problem
of remembering the past and making it work for the present. They have autobiogra­
phy as a method of concept, and the autobiographical for each of them is an ‘epis­
temic object’. Biography is neither an object in a realistical sense, nor is it ‘only’ a
construction. It is rather the specifically scientific way of engaging with the world
through which the writing of the self becomes relevant for the expert and his or her
audience.
Psychoanalysis entertains a complex and rich relation to autobiography. It has
often been noted how it obviously contributes to autobiography as a genre and as an
interdiscourse of the human sciences. This complexity and richness makes it exceed­
ingly difficult to summarize the issue at hand. This article addresses three main issues
concerning the significance of autobiography in psychoanalysis and the effects of this
liaison:
Firstly, psychoanalysis relies on autobiography, or rather: auto-narration as a
medium of therapy and as a taken-for-granted object of its practice. Narration, in a
broad sense which encompasses narrative fragments and other forms of speech, is
what the interaction within the therapeutic setting is famously based on (‘talking
cure’). In this sense, it is the medium of therapy, that is itself invisible, but renders
the psychic processes intelligible and accessible. At the same time, as specific indi­
vidual narration, it becomes – as biography – the object of psychoanalysis, which is
reconstructed in the therapeutic process.
Secondly, it surprisingly displays a critical, if not hostile attitude to biography.
This criticality turns specifically against the ‘hagiographical’ aspect of autonarration,
autobiography and biography. Hagiography, the practice of lauding a person, more
or less discreetly idealizes a person’s life and manners. (Technically speaking, hagi­
ography is the writing of the life histories of saints or publicly important person. In a
broader sense, it is the idealization of a person’s character through a certain style of
life history. We refer to this broader sense.) If applied to oneself, hagiography becomes
one of the major obstacles to the knowing oneself which psychoanalysis seeks to
attain, and to which it attributes a large part of its therapeutic efficacy.
Thirdly, biography provides psychoanalysis an additional chance to further con­
textualize its efficacy as a therapeutic methodology. Biography is, for psychoanalysis,
also a means for demonstrating its practices and successes to a broader public, by
offering an alternative account of public figures’ lives. This can be coined the discur­
sive function of autobiography within psychoanalysis. As far as the life history also

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-017
 1.16 Psychoanalysis 149

becomes data for the psychoanalyst as a scientist, this discursivation also enables the
communication between therapists and researchers in the field of psychoanalysis and
its neighboring disciplines, such as literature, sociology, cultural studies, and med­
icine. Psychoanalysis thus contributes to the interdiscursive field of autobiography
and autofiction.
The following deals with psychoanalytic thought and practice regarding these
three aspects: the positivity of autobiography within psychoanalysis, its criticality
towards the autobiographical, and the discursivity of biography.
Firstly: Narration becomes the object of psychoanalysis, insofar as the narration
of the patient is constructed in the therapeutic process in what has been called the
psychoanalytic intersubjectivity. This objectification, or symbolization in psycho­
analytic terminology, is what allows the patient and the analyst to reconstruct their
experiences. It is in this intersubjectivity that “die Botschaften […], die sich dem Kind
einschreiben oder das es in das eigene Begehren übersetzt oder mit ihm vermittelt, die
nicht bewußt werden und daher unbewußt wirksam bleiben, […] zu den unbewußten
Szenen [werden], die sich in der Übertragung zwischen dem Analysanden und dem
Analytiker wiederholen” [‘the messages (…) which become inscribed in the child or
which it translates into its own desire or mediates with it, which do not become con­
scious and thereby stay unsconsciously effective, become the unsconscious scenes,
which repeat themselves in the transference between the analysand and analyst’],
which enables a process of remembering which could be called “psychoanalytische
Erinnerung zweiter Ordnung” [‘second-order psychoanalytic memory’] (Küchenhoff
1996, 13, 15). In this first sense, the relation between writing the self and psychoanaly­
sis is an affirmative one: transference in the therapeutic setting allows the analysand
to unearth unconscious, systematically forgotten memories. Even though analysis is
seen as a method of recovering and reclaiming memory, it is entirely clear that this
recollection is not the discovery of historical fact or the noemena of memory itself; it
is – in being a reconstruction, nevertheless a construction. Freud himself describes
‘construction’ as the result of an intersubjective, dialogical meaning-making process
(Freud 1937d) in which the analyst performs a labor which “eine weitgehende Überein­
stimmung mit der des Archäologen [zeigt], der eine zerstörte und verschüttete Wohn­
stätte oder ein Bauwerk der Vergangenheit ausgräbt” [“resembles to a great extent the
archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried
or of some ancient edifice”] (Freud 1937d, 45 [1959, 258]). But construction is not only
a metaphor borrowed from the cultural sciences, it is also a therapeutic technique
which confronts the patient with a certain psychoanalytic impertinence, as when the
therapist tells the patient:

Bis zu Ihrem nten Jahr haben Sie sich als alleinigen und unbeschränkten Besitzer der Mutter
betrachtet, dann kam ein zweites Kind und mit ihm eine schwere Enttäuschung. Die Mutter hat
Sie für eine Weile verlassen, sich auch später Ihnen nicht mehr ausschließlich gewidmet. Ihre
Empfindungen für die Mutter wurden ambivalent, der Vater gewann eine neue Bedeutung für
Sie und so weiter
150 1 Theoretical Approaches

[Up to the nth year you considered yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother,
then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some
time and even after her reappearance she was not devoted to you exclusively. Your feeling toward
your mother became ambivalent, your father attained a new meaning for you’ … and so on]
(Freud 1937d, 48 [1959, 261]).

This sort of proposition in the form of a generic experience at once sexual, moral and
ethical had – at the time of the formulation of psychoanalytic thought – been at odds
with the self-understanding of an average self-respecting adult. Speaking in literary
terms, it deploys an alienation effect which is well known in twentieth-century liter­
ature, as when Kafka’s travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to
find himself transformed into a monstrous “Ungeziefer”, or beetle, and when Gogol’s
hero finds out his nose has a life of its own in St. Petersburg. But does psychoanalysis
deploy techniques of literature? This question will be dealt with in the third para­
graph.
As it will be demonstrated, there is a second relation of psychoanalysis to (auto-)
biography, which is not one of reconstruction, but of deconstruction. The critical
stance psychoanalysis takes toward the autobiographical can be shown through its
use of two psychoanalytical concepts, ‘Nachträglichkeit’ [‘afterwardsness’ (Laplanche
2006, 32)] (Freud 1899a, 531–554) and the ‘Familienroman’ [‘family romance’] (Freud
1909c, 227–231). (The editor of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, translated ‘Nachträglichkeit’ as “deferred
action”. We follow Jean Laplanche by arguing that deferred action only captures a
part of the meaning of ‘Nachträglichkeit’ intended by Freud. It does not capture the
constitution of the meaning of the past in the presence because it is focused only on
the level of an action being delayed. So the neologism ‘afterwardsness’ is used here,
invented by Laplanche [2006, 32] and the ‘family romance’.)
Invented by Sigmund Freud in 1897 and recovered by Jacques Lacan in the 1950s
(Lacan 1956, 71–170) the concept of ‘afterwardsness’ gained popularity in psycho­
analytical and interdisciplinary discourse concerning memory, trauma and narra­
tion during the last two decades of the last century. Being a crucial part of the early
Freudian theory of memory and trauma, the concept of ‘afterwardsness’ deals with
the constitution of psychological meaning and its special temporality, the future II
(something will have been…). In Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse [The language of Psy-
choanalysis] Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis give a short version of the
meaning of afterwardsness: “des expériences, des impressions, des traces mnésiques
sont remaniées ultérieurement en function d’expériences nouvelles et de l’accèss à
un nouveau degré de développement” [“experiences, impressions and memory-traces
may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of
a new stage of development”] (Laplanche and Pontalis 1981, 33 [1973, 107]).
The subject as an author described here is forced to rewrite its history at any stage
of psychological development: There is no past that could be remembered in the sense
 1.16 Psychoanalysis 151

of being found again, the way in which the past is remembered is shaped by the sub­
ject’s present state. The process described here is considered to be normal. It becomes
visible in the case of trauma, if there are experiences that could not be understood at
the time they happened and therefore were not integrated into a context of meaning.
Crucial here is adolescence, referred to as “die Avantgarde des Individuums” [‘the
individual’s avantgarde’] by Mario Erdheim (1993, 936) and here we can see that ‘after­
wardsness’ also provides a great chance. As Erdheim puts it adolescence is not only
the period where symptoms pop up but also a second chance: Because of what Freud
called the “zweiseitiger Ansatz” [“diphasic onset”] (Freud 1925d, 67 [1925, 32]) of sexual
growth the fact that according to psychoanalysis adult sexuality cannot be understood
without referring to the childrens’ infantile sexuality, we have to deal with two stages
of the constitution of meaning (Erdheim 1993, 941). An ongoing interaction of pres­
ence and past creates a great number of meanings that cannot be foreseen (Erdheim
1993, 941). Psychoanalysis itself, more precisely what happened in the psychoana­
lytical process, therefore should be seen as a ‘new restored adolescence’ (Erdheim
1993, 947). Jean Laplanche takes adolescence as a model for the conception of any
other stage of human development beginning with early childhood: While coming late
in the history of a subject adolescence is on a conceptional level the paradigm that
helps to understand what is happening in earlier periods (Laplanche 1989, 107). Hence
evolution is seen by Laplanche as an almost endless process of translation. A subject
enters time by translating its history again and again. During this lifelong process
earlier forms of translation are covered by newer ones. The stages of early childhood
development described by psychoanalysis as orality, anality, genitality can therefore
be seen as languages that succeed in a process of detranslation and retranslation.
From the perspective of social sciences, Regina Becker-Schmidt uses what she
calls an “erweitertes Konzept der Nachträglichkeit” [‘extended concept of after­
wardsness’] (1994, 155–156) to describe ‘non-linear structures of time in biographies’.
‘Afterwardsness’ is defined as a general psychological process, in which memories,
self awareness and awareness of others are reinterpreted afterwards but only if the
present state of mind allows to integrate them in a new context (Becker-Schmidt 1994,
174). Biographies and autobiographies as well should therefore always be seen as an
attempt and result of linearization, due to what can be called the “narrative tendency”
of the psyche (Laplanche 2002/2003a, 26–29). Interpretation of (auto-)biographies
should therefore be sensible for gaps and irritations in order not to remain superficial.
In his list of the most important sexual phantasies of puberty Freud lists the so
called “Familienroman” [“family romance”] (Freud 1909c, 227 [1959, 235]), the adoles­
cent’s reaction to the changes in his relation to his parents. Beginning in prepuberty
the child phantazises about descending from other parents, who are richer, more
famous – in every sense better than the real parents. Those phantasies are accord­
ing to Freud made up to correct frustrations and mortifications from early childhood
(Freud 1909c, 227–231 [1959, 235–242]). In “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da
Vinci” [“Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood”] Freud’s most ambitious
152 1 Theoretical Approaches

attempt to write a biography, he changes perspective and demonstrates the limits of

psychoanalytic biographical writing. Trying to write a psychoanalytic biography, e. g.
dealing with symptoms and conflicts, trying to give a psychoanalytical interpretation
of somebodys life, one has to deal with a degree of freedom that cannot be dissolved
by psychoanalysis. This is, of course, an effect of ‘afterwardsness’:

Aber selbst bei ausgiebigster Verfügung über das historische Material und bei gesichertster Hand­
habung der psychischen Mechanismen würde eine psychoanalytische Untersuchung an zwei
bedeutsamen Stellen die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit nicht ergeben können, daß das Indivi­
duum nur so und nicht anders werden konnte
[But even if the historical material at our disposal were very abundant, and if the psychical mech­
anisms could be dealt with with the greatest assurance, there are two important points at which a
psycho-analytic enquiry would not be able to make us understand how inevitable it was that the
person concerned should have turned out in the way he did and in no other way] (Freud 1910c,
208 [1957, 135]).

According to Freud family romance can be seen as “die Quelle der ganzen Dichtung”
[“the source of the whole poetic fiction”] (Freud 1939a, 108–109 [1964, 10]) as he
demonstrates with what he calls a “Durchschnittssage” [“average legend”] (Freud
1939a, 107 [1964, 12]), which consists of the following elements: a highborn child is
burdened with a curse, abandoned, saved and brought up by animals and ordinary
people, finds its parents again as an adult, takes revenge (on the father), is recognized
and gets magnitude and fame (Freud 1939a, 107 [1964, 12]). Here we can easily see the
family romance as a reaction to the changes of the child’s feelings for the parents:
the “großartige[] Überschätzung des Vaters” [“enormous overvaluation of his father”]
(Freud 1939a, 109 [1964, 12]) of early childhood is followed by rivalry and disappoint­
ment, the separation from the parents is accompanied by phantasies about better
parentage (Freud 1939a, 108 [1964, 12]).
Psychoanalytic ‘afterwardsness’ constitutes a necessary fictional moment in all
autobiographical narration, which is so effective that a thorough deconstruction of its
rationalisations is warranted in psychoanalytic practice. The ‘family romance’ is not
only a biased version of the ‘real’ life history, but a phantasmatic product, for which
the objective facts of life become legitimations, not vice versa. In this sense, every psy­
choanalytic writing of the self is an anti-biography in being a dialogical and radical
alternative to the idealized account of the bourgeois self-image. Certainly, psychoanal­
ysis captures the imagination with the promise of knowing oneself better than ever
imaginable; a promise which Michel Foucault has described as a ‘volonté de savoir’
[‘will to truth’] (Foucault 1979 [1976]). This will to knowledge, however, needed to be
installed historically, which leads us to the third aspect, the discursive function of
biography within psychoanalysis and reaching beyond it.
Contrary to the situation when Foucault engaged with psychoanalysis at the peak
of its institutional power it had to surmount considerable resistance to its methods
during the time of its foundation. The reinterpretation of publicly known biographies
 1.16 Psychoanalysis 153

was an important method of demonstrating its merits in a wider public: The Schre­
ber case, The devil’s neurosis, Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevskij, Michelangelo, Goethe.
The list of historic and contemporary individuals Freud and his contemporaries have
psychoanalyzed from autobiographic or biographic material is long; and these psycho­
analytic biographies are certainly not – only – contributions to the psychology of art
and literature. First and foremostly, they are contributions to the genre of memoir and
biography, both of great importance in a wider literary and political public, and func­
tion as a proof-of-concept for psychoanalytic ideas and methods. In that function, they
also serve as a hinge between psychoanalytic discourse and other areas of knowledge.
In his analysis of an historic case of demon possession, Freud claims that

[e]s […] auch gar nicht [s]eine Absicht [ist], diesen Fall als Beweismittel für die Gültigkeit der Psy­
choanalyse zu verwerten; [er] setze vielmehr die Psychoanalyse als gültig voraus und verwende
sie dazu, um die dämonologische Erkrankung des Malers aufzuklären
[nor is it [his] intention to make use of this case as evidence of the validity of psycho-analysis. On
the contrary, [he] presuppose[s] its validity and [is] employing it to throw light on the painter’s
demonological illness] (Freud 1923d, 329 [1959, 67]).

Is this really not what he intends? Freud explicitly frames the biographical contribu­
tions in this problematic of public acceptance:

Gegen die Psychoanalyse erhebt sich wieder der Vorwurf, daß sie einfache Verhältnisse in spitz­
findiger Weise kompliziert, Geheimnisse und Probleme dort sieht, wo sie nicht existieren, und
daß sie diese bewerkstelligt, indem sie kleine und nebensächliche Züge, wie man sie überall
finden kann, übermäßig betont und zu Trägern der weitgehendsten und fremdartigsten Schlüsse
erhebt
[Psycho-analysis has once more to meet the reproach that it makes hair-splitting complications
in the simplest things and sees mysteries and problems where none exist, and that it does this
by laying undue stress on insignificant and irrelevant details, such as occur everywhere, and
making them the basis of the most far-reaching and strangest conclusions] (Freud 1923d, 328
[1959, 68]).

The reinterpretation of publicly known biographies such as that of Senate President

Schreber’s gives psychoanalytic scholarship the chance to demonstrate the explica­
tion of seemingly bizzarre and threatening psychic phenomena and to reintegrate
them. In the demonic neurosis case, the tender but also greatly fearful relation to
the father – impersonated by the devil – is at the center of Christoph Heitzmann’s
affliction. It is no coincidence that Heitzmann is a painter. Freud’s hypothesis of an
ambivalent attitude toward the father is greatly aided by an image which Heitzmann
himself had painted to show how he saw the devil with his own eyes – and which
perspicuously is included in Freud’s own text. In the painting, the devil has breasts,
which illustrates the argument of male desire for an erotic position vis-a-vis the father
rather handsomely.
It is hardly a coincidence that it is often artists’ biographies which are recon­
structed. These artists are producers of evocative images and other works of art, which
154 1 Theoretical Approaches

Freud enlists as pictorial evidence for his own analysis of these personalities. Their
artistic work is – we dare to say – analysed as to contribute convincing arguments
for the validity of psychoanalytic diagnoses and thus for psychoanalytic thought as
a whole. Psychoanalytic thought thus becomes plausible through the combination
of biographic data and artistic artefacts. The discursivity of autobiography in and
outside of psychoanalysis gathers momentum in the triangle of public cases, clini­
cal language and aesthetics. The relevance of psychoanalytic thought for autobiog­
raphy and auto-fiction is thus not alone an effect of the success of psychoanalytic
thought and its dissemination into public discourse, but also of strategic efforts to
find a favourable place for psychoanalytic practice in the public imagination, thereby
attempting to ‘restore adolescence’ to culture at large. As such psychoanalytic biog­
raphies found widespread attention and had found repercussions in the tropes of
personal and literary biographies, we can conclude that ‘afterwardsness’ does not
only have a methodological and clinical meaning, but that it applies as well to auto­
biographical discourse: after the fact, psychoanalysis finds new, meanwhile better
acquainted ways to account for stories which were already told a first time.

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Becker-Schmidt, Regina. “Diskontinuität und Nachträglichkeit.” Erfahrung mit Methode. Ed. Ange-
lika Diezinger, Hedwig Kitzer and Ingrid Anker. Freiburg i. Br.: Kore, 1994. 155–182.
Bruder, Klaus-Jürgen, ed. “Die biographische Wahrheit ist nicht zu haben”: Psychoanalyse und
Biographieforschung. Frankfurt a. M.: Psychosozial, 2003.
Erdheim, Mario. “Psychoanalyse, Adoleszenz und Nachträglichkeit.” Psyche 49 (1993): 934–950.
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. I: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [The
History of Sexuality. Vol. I: The will to truth. Trans. R. Hurley. London: Allen Lane, 1979].
Freud, Sigmund. “Über Deckerinnerungen.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. I. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999.
531–554 (Freud 1899a) [„Screen Memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. Vol. III (1893–1899). Ed. and trans.
James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962. 299–322].
Freud, Sigmund. „Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. V. Frankfurt a. M.:
Fischer, 1999. 33–72 (Freud 1905d) [“Three Essays on Sexuality.” The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality
and Other Works. Vol. VII (1901–1905). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953. 123–246].
Freud, Sigmund. „Der Familienroman der Neurotiker.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. VII. Frankfurt
a. M.: Fischer, 1999. 227–231 (Freud 1909c) [“Family Romances.” The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works. Vol. IX
(1906–1908). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1959. 235–242].
Freud, Sigmund. „Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. VIII.
Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999. 128–211 (Freud 1910c) [“Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his
Childhood.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Five
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works. Vol. XI (1910). Ed. and trans.
James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957. 57–138].
 1.16 Psychoanalysis 155

Freud, Sigmund. „Selbstdarstellung.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XIV. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999.
33–96 (Freud 1925d) [“An Autobiographical Study.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
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Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 1–74].
Freud, Sigmund. „ Konstruktionen in der Analyse.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVI. Frankfurt a. M.:
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cho-Analysis and Other Works. Vol. XXIII (1937–1939). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London:
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 255–270].
Freud, Sigmund. „ Eine Teufelsneurose im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XIII.
Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2009. 317–353 (Freud 1923d) [“A Seventeenth-Century Demonological
Neurosis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The
Ego and the Id and Other Works. Vol. XIX (1923–1925). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London:
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 67–106].
Freud, Sigmund. „ Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVI.
Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999. 103–246 (Freud 1939a) [“Moses and Monotheism.” The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Moses and Monotheism, An
Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works. Vol. XXIII (1937–1939). Ed. and trans. James Stra-
chey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964. 1–138].
Küchenhoff, Joachim. “Zum Stellenwert der Biographie in der Psychoanalyse.” Zeitschrift für Psycho-
somatische Medizin 42 (1996): 1–24.
Lacan, Jacques. „Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychoanalyse.” Écrits. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1966. 237–322 [“Funktion und Feld des Sprechens und der Sprache in der
Psychoanalyse” (1956). Schriften I. Ed. and trans. Norbert Haas. Olten: Walter, 1973. 71–170].
Laplanche, Jean. Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 2008 [New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Trans. David Macey. Oxford/Cambridge:
Basil Blackwell, 1989].
Laplanche, Jean. “Narrativity and Hermeneutics: Some Propositions.” New Formations 48
(2002/2003): 26–29 (Laplanche 2002/2003a).
Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques IV. L’après coup. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006.
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Paris: Presses Uni-
versitaires de France, 7th ed. 1981 [The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicol-
son-Smith. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973].

Further Reading
Kirchhoff, Christine. Das psychoanalytische Konzept der Nachträglichkeit. Gießen: Psychosozial-Ver-
lag, 2009.
1.17 Religious Studies
Jens Schlamelcher

How do scholars of religious studies use and analyse autobiographies? Why is the
study of autobiographies important for religious studies, and why should scholars
of autobiographies take religion into account? Before addressing these questions, it
seems to be important to make some comments about the nature of religious studies
as a (non-?)discipline. In fact, the disciplinary status of religious studies is precarious,
at best. Its program can best be outlined by its contrast to theology. Whereas theology
(and theological approaches to the study of religion, such as religious phenomenol­
ogy) is not neutral with respect to truly religious questions, such as the existence of
God, etc., religious studies does step back from giving an answer. While such ques­
tions as those concerning the existence of God, angels and other ‘supernatural beings’
can neither be empirically verified nor falsified, religious studies takes the pragmatic
approach, to study religion as a socio-cultural artefact, or, according to Emile Durk­
heim, as a social (and psychological) fact – which can be observed empirically. This
move, however, which emancipates religious studies from theology, opens the door
for other disciplines. The whole range of social studies and humanities is thus invited
to contribute to the enterprise of studying religion as a social and psychological fact.
As such, religious studies has the special position of an interdisciplinary discipline.
It draws upon area studies such as Middle Eastern or African studies, on the various
disciplines focussing on religious traditions, such as Muslim Studies, Buddhology,
and even theology, on literary studies, on philosophy, psychology, on history, on
anthropology, and (probably most important) on sociology. As such, religious studies
is held together by the focus on a distinctive social fact – i. e. religion. But it borrows
its methods, its theories and even its topics from other disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences.
How then does religious studies contribute to the study of autobiography? Why
is the analysis of autobiographies important to the study of religions? The status of
religious studies as an interdisciplinary discipline makes it seemingly impossible
to reflect on the discipline’s perspective on autobiography. Taking that disciplinary
status seriously, one could easily end this overview article here by asking the reader
to draw upon the other contributions to this section of the volume and look for any
references to the term ‘religion’. Obviously, the author of this article has chosen for
another approach. In a first step, the historical relationship between religion and
autobiography will be outlined. The next paragraph turns to the question of why and
how scholars of religion read and even generate autobiographies. Finally, issues for
further research on the religion-autobiography nexus will be addressed.
As has long been acknowledged, autobiography, and even biography, e. g. the
textualization of life, its narration as a meaningful (true?) story of the historical devel­
opment of the self, is by no means what could be called an ‘anthropological given’.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-018
 1.17 Religious Studies 157

Cultures “without history” (Wolf 1982), for example, do not conceive life as biography,
and in world history, we can hardly trace back autobiographical documents further
than late antiquity. Thus, cultural sociologist Alois Hahn, one of the main contribu­
tors to the sociological study of biography, speaks about ‘biography generators’, e. g.
cultural developments that facilitated a process in which people began to narrate their
lives as a meaningful and true story:

Ob das Ich über Formen des Gedächtnisses verfügt, die symbolisch seine gesamte Vita themati­
sieren, das hängt vom Vorhandensein von sozialen Institutionen ab, die eine solche Rückbesin­
nung auf das eigene Dasein gestatten. Wir wollen solche Institutionen Biographiegeneratoren
nennen
[‘Whether the Ego has forms of memory at its disposal that are able to symbolically thematize its
entire vita depends upon the availability of social institutions that allow for such a contemplation
of one’s own existence. We will call such institutions biography generators’] (Hahn 1987, 12).

As Hahn (1983, 1987) argues, most of the biography generators have a Christian foun­
dation. In what he calls, referring to Norbert Elias, the ‘process of civilization’, Hahn
traces back a first incentive for the emergence of biography towards the early medieval
practice of the confession. Initiated by Irish monks, the laity had to confess their sinful
deeds. From as early as the twelfth century, the investigation of one’s conscience
became one of the main preoccupations. Not the deed itself, but rather its motive had
to be explored. From now on, the absolution of sins implied their willful repentance.
The rise of Protestantism was a further turning point in Hahn’s history of self-thema­
tization. In Protestant theology, the absolution of one’s sins was no longer possible.
Thus, methods for rational self-control had to be developed in order to ensure their
avoidance. This gave rise to diaries in which individuals would register even the small­
est sins, in order to observe and confess to themselves their weaknesses, and to help
them to become more pious and sincere.
This process of subjectivization, in which an individual conceives itself as a
subject, had previously been observed by thinkers such as Max Weber and Michel
Foucault. The latter stating that “l’homme occidental est devenu un animal confes­
sant” [‘Western man has become a confessing animal’] (Foucault 1976, 79), striving for
ever more revelation of the self. Christianity’s role as a motor in the development of
autobiography as a specific textual genre is now widely acknowledged:

To say that Christianity has been a shaping force in the development of western life writing and,
particularly, in the development of deep subjective autobiography is an understatement. It has
been the major inspiration of autobiographical utterance in the Western culture and the domi­
nant matrix for its articulation over 2000 years (Abbs 2001, 211).

In non-Western cultures such as China, the emergence of autobiographies seems to be

a more recent phenomenon (Wu 1990; Brockmeier 2008; for Buddhist autobiographies
of eighteenth-century Tibet, see Gyatso 1998). But it is still an open research question
whether Christianity alone can be conceived as a religion that generated autobiogra­
158 1 Theoretical Approaches

phy as a specific literary genre (for a discussion of Jewish pre-modern and modern
autobiographies, see Moosley 2005). The religion-autobiography nexus may also be
analysed by insights gained from Max Weber’s sociology of religion. Weber (1963)
argues that religious evolution implies a shift from ritualized forms to ethical conduct.
Early religious traditions would demand the correct performance of rituals, but not
ethical perfection. On the basis of pure/impure, ritual masters only had to ensure
their temporal purity when enacting the ritual. This pattern would gradually change
with the emergence of the so called ‘religions of salvation’, which demanded not only
confession to the true religion, but also moral perfection, or, in Weber’s terms, an
‘ethical conduct of life’. This development may well have corresponded with the rise
of cities and thus with a tendency toward impersonal ties, where individual action is
less bound by the obligation to sustain kinship ties and expectations, thus giving rise
to the problem of morality (e. g. why be ‘good’ when honest behavior is not necessarily
rewarded).
This ethical conduct of life may be one of the most important stimulators for
the emergence of the literary genre of autobiography, at least among religious virtu­
osi. Thus, one of the first books considered in literary studies as ‘autobiography’ is
the famous volume by Augustinus titled Confessiones (written between 397 and 401
CE), in which he literally confesses the history of his life as a story, leading from a
Pagan childhood to the philosophical quarrellings in his youth, until finally iden­
tifying Christianity as the only true faith. While autobiography is generally shaped
by the tension between character and characterization (Barbour 1987, 312–317), e. g.
the quest to assess and reveal one’s character, but under the condition of limited,
situated knowledge, and by means of language (using metaphors and other tropes),
­Augustine seems to be fully self-conscious about the discrepancy, and self-critical
about the partly impossible enterprise of getting from the one to the other. Augustine
raised problems such as the unity of the self and the nexus between the self and one’s
knowledge of it, and problematized the use of language in one’s self-assessment.
While Augustine thus highlights the tensions between fact and fiction, thus antici­
pating core issues that were raised in postmodern literary theory, it is also important
for the religion-autobiography nexus at the core of his quarrel. Augustine was neither
familiar with the modern tag ‘autobiography’ nor with the medieval concept of confes­
sion. Yet, there seems to be a theological impetus. Augustine frames his path of life as
conversion: the road of one’s imperfect, sinful self towards truth, struggling for moral
purity in order to hopefully and possibly receive God’s mercy.
Until the rise of modernity, when the term ‘autobiography’ was finally shaped
or ‘invented’, Western autobiographical accounts seemed to be always interwoven
with confession. In Augustine’s work, as well as those of medieval autobiographers
such as Rather of Verona (890–974), Otloh of S. Emmeram (ca.1010–1070), Guibert
of Nogent (ca.1055–1125), Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Markward of Fulda (1150–1165),
Suger of St. Denis (ca.1080–1151) or Giraldus Cambrensis (1147–1223) (Röckelein 1997,
34), God is addressed as a recipient – even though it was quite clear that these writings
 1.17 Religious Studies 159

would address (also, if not mainly) – a human audience. In fact, as Pierre Courcelle’s
classic study has shown (Courcelle 1963), Augustinus‘ Confessiones seemed to serve as
the standard model for pre-modern writing of Christian autobiographies. This holds
true even for early modern autobiographies such as that of Canisius (see Pabel 2007,
462–473). Pre-modern autobiographical accounts thus had, so to speak, the double
function of both ‘confessio’ (directed to God) and ‘exemplum’ (directed to the human
audience). This close connection of confession (of religious virtuosi) and autobio­
graphy seems to have withered away with the onset of modernity as the genuine
‘culture of autobiography’ (Brockmeier 2008, 19) or the ‘Age of the Subject’. The clas­
sical account on the history of autobiography, Georg Misch (1955, 55), refers to this
nexus as a Christian-autobiographical “Gemengelage” or “conglomerate”. Wagner-
Egelhaaf (2005, 124) speaks of a “functional connection” of medieval autobiographies
and Christian belief. During the Baroque, first autobiographies appeared which broke
with the Christian religion-autobiography nexus. The autobiography of the gold smith
Benvenuto Cellini (1558–1566), for example, centers upon his secular achievements,
with only set phrases about confession or God, which marks a remarkable shift from
theo-centric to an ego- or anthropocentric view of the world (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005,
138–139). Later modern autobiographies, such as Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser
would follow this path. Modern biographies are neither ‘confessio’ nor ‘exemplum’,
but rather presentations and explorations of one’s self. Religion, as it seems, has lost
its function as a biography generator. Religion plays a role only in so far as the writers
refer to experiences with religious institutions.
However, this apparent secularization, which may better be understood as
de-Christianization, was, for a long period, rather an avant-garde phenomenon. Bio­
graphical and auto-biographical accounts by non-bourgeois individuals reveal not
only high degrees of religiosity, but also the religious framing of their life-narratives
(Mitterauer 1988, 82–83). An apparent de-confessionalization of non-bourgeois biog­
raphies, when life ceased to be shaped by religious institutions, when remarkable
public events turned away from religious rituals to secular happenings, is only observ­
able since the 1960s (Ebertz 1995). This reveals that the apparent high-culture secular­
ization and de-religiosification of autobiographies that began in the late eighteenth
century has become a mass-culture phenomenon only in recent times, associated with
processes of religious transformation in ‘late‘, ‘post‘ or ‘second‘ modernity (among
others Gebhardt 2011 and Hellemanns 2005).
However, does this mean the end of a religion-autobiography nexus, or rather its
transformation? Social theory may help answer this question. There is a second argu­
ment, mainly derived from sociological theory, which argues that a new, de-Christian­
ized religion-autobiography nexus has evolved. This argument shall be outlined in the
following. The rise of modern autobiography as a literary genre is often explained by
theories of individualization (among others, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1994). The plu­
ralization of life opportunities in early modernity went hand in hand with a growing
need for personal orientation (Engelhart 1990; Fritzen 2010, 378–380). Autobiography
160 1 Theoretical Approaches

thus offered a means to reflect upon why one’s individual life has followed certain
paths, as a result of personal constraints and individual choices. As life became more
and more contingent, people developed new forms of self-reflexivity, of which autobi­
ography was one of the most prominent.
Another social theory, not at odds with the thesis of individualization but coming
from a different angle, is that of functional differentiation (Luhmann 1998). Accord­
ing to this theory, modern society is no longer structured by stratification into dif­
ferent ranks, but by functional systems such as the economy, law, politics, educa­
tion, social welfare, and religion. These functional systems become more and more
autonomous from each other. Due to this macro-process, religion seems to lose its
pre-modern social function. In pre-modern times, religion served as a ‘sacred canopy’
(Berger 1967) which would legitimate any – inherently contingent – social order and
reframe it as ‘natural’. The functionally differentiated sub-systems of modern society,
however, do not rest on a religious foundation for their legitimation. Political insti­
tutions and leaders, for example, are legitimated not by reference to the will of God,
but to the will of the people (which apparently holds true even for dictatorships). This
emancipation has deep consequences for religious communication. As Peter L. Berger
(1967, 127–155) and Niklas Luhmann (1989, 309) argue, religious communication works
best if it is restricted. While drawing upon the distinction between immanence and
transcendence, the door is potentially open for any kind of belief. Nothing is per se
unbelievable. But any social effect of belief rests upon its social institutionalization.
Finally, the emperor by the grace of God would raise his sword to defend God from any
alternative beliefs. The autonomization of politics, however, removed this restriction
of religious communication, or, of the say- and believable. Religious freedom thus also
means the flourishing of religious communication, a condition under which religion,
as a means to deal with ontological contingency, becomes contingent itself. Not only
the social but also the individual status of religion becomes precarious in modern
times. Whereas the degree of one’s social integration mainly depends on financial
income (economy), education, and legal status, one’s individual religious status is
most often socially optional or irrelevant. Functional differentiation thus implies reli­
gious processes of transformation that go along the paths of increasing indifference.
Belief mainly makes a difference for oneself, but not necessarily for others.
But this ‘secularization’, understood as a decline of religion, is only one part of
the story. Individualization and functional differentiation also lead to an increasing
pluralization of religious options. And the individual acceptance of any belief has
turned into an individual achievement. Not only is not opting for any belief a religious
option, but also the opting for a specific religion, and furthermore, the elaboration of
one’s individual religiosity. Thus, secularization, individualization, and pluralization
are processes of religious transformation that seem to happen at the same time (Pickel
and Pollack 2003, 447–474). This has also consequences for the relation between reli­
gion and autobiography. Analytically, one can distinguish between autobiographies
that are motivated and deeply influenced by religion, in short ‘religious autobiogra­
 1.17 Religious Studies 161

phies’; secondly, biographies can refer to religion or to the autobiographical reflec­

tions of religious beliefs, practices and institutions. Thirdly, there are autobiographies
without any religious references (Engelhardt 2004, 152–164).
However, some scholars of the sociology of religion go even further and argue
that functional differentiation also means an (auto-)biographization of religion. The
individual is the realm in which the disparate parts of a functionally differentiated
society come together (Nassehi 1995, 114). According to Armin Nassehi, an individual
in modernity is a psychic unity for sure, but on the other hand, by participating in
all of the social systems at once, it is also a social ‘dividuum’. This tension has to be
resolved, the unity of the difference between individual unity and social divisibility
has to be formed mainly by means of biographization, an increasing reflexivity of the
self. But this implies a religious move, since the closing of the gap from divisibility
to individuality can only be achieved by means of transcendence. As Nassehi states:
“Das letzte großte Thema der Religion wird die Transzendenz des eigenen Lebens”
[‘The last great topic of religion is the transcendence of individual life’] (Nassehi 1995,
115). Indeed, the self has become a transcendent entity, and thus the main locus for
both, biography and religion, at the same time. Thus, religion and autobiography are
drawn into an intrinsic relationship, once again.
Self-biographization has received most attention from scholars of religion who
are interested in highly religious individuals. This is especially the case in conver­
sion studies. Conversion, as it seems, is a biography generator par excellence. Again,
Augustine’s Confessiones can serve as exemplum, because his framing of his path
from a pagan child to an adult Christian draws upon narrative elements that can also
be found in even (post-)modern biographical conversion narrations: the retrospective
of a life in misery, the quest to find true belief (with many unfulfilling experiences),
the occasional encounter with a religious group, and, most important, a special event
that marks the turning point of one’s life (Leitner 2000, 61), e. g. one’s personal reve­
lation, and finally, the happiness and qualm of having found one’s spiritual homeland
(Krech 2005, 358–363).

One can speak of a type of texts, because the representation almost always follows the same
scheme, regardless of language or system of belief: The conversion is recounted, that is, repre­
sented as the event of a conversion, and thus integrated into a vita in a way that renders it as a
crossroads in the self-biographical narrative, and thus divides that life into a before and after
(Leitner 2000, 64).

The life story is thus divided into two periods, one before and one after the religious
peak experience that constitutes the moment of conversion, which at the same time
marks the centre of the narration.
However, even autobiographies which do not place religion at the center of their
narration are important for scholars of religion, because they can tell something
about processes of religious transformation. Autobiographies are, in fact, a primary
source for religious scholars to learn something about the religious environment of
162 1 Theoretical Approaches

an author’s time. Ausgustine’s Confessiones thus opens a window into the religious
plurality of late Antiquity, and its dawn. This holds also true for investigations into the
nature of contemporary religion. Sometimes autobiography is even used as a method
of the social sciences, e. g. autobiographies are ‘artificially’ produced by narrative
interviews. The narrative interview as a specific form of qualitative data acquisition
(Schütze 1983) generates autobiographies through the impact of a scholar, which can
then be used to identify not only individual but also social processes of religious trans­
formation. The process of the de-confessionalization of biography, mentioned above,
has been identified by precisely this method.
As a general conclusion, it seems that autobiography is not one of the main topics
in contemporary religious studies. It has gained some attention in the 1980s and
1990s, but systematic elaborations are still rare. On the other hand, elaborations of
single autobiographies, past and present, seem to flourish. Thus, the study of auto­
biography, or -ies, from the point of view of the study of religion, still seems to be in
its fledgling stages.

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Misch, Georg. Das Mittelalter. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. II. Frankfurt a. M.: Schulte-
Bulmke, 1955.
Mitterauer, Michael. “Religion in lebensgeschichtlichen Aufzeichnungen.” Biographie – sozial­
geschichtlich. Ed. Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch and Helga Merkel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1988. 61–86.
Moosley, Marcus. Being For Myself Alone: Origins Of Jewish Autobiography. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005.
Nassehi, Armin. „Religion und Biographie: Zum Bezugsproblem religiöser Kommunikation in der
Moderne.” Religion und Biographie: Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche. Ed. Monika Wohlrab-
Sahr. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus. 103–126.
Pabel, Hilmar M. “Augustine’s Confessions and the Autobiographies of Peter Canisius.” Church
History and Religious Culture 87 (2007): 453–477.
Pollack, Detlef, and Gert Pickel. “De-Institutionalisierung des Religiösen und religiöse Individualisie­
rung in Ost- und Westdeutschland.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 55
(2003): 447–474.
Röckelein, Hedwig. “Reflexionen über Erziehung und Lebenslauf in Autobiographien des Hoch­
mittelalters.” Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 2 (1995): 33–58.
Schütze, Fritz. “Biographieforschung und narratives Interview.” Neue Praxis 13/3 (1983):
283–293.
Ulmer, Bernd. “Konversionserzählungen als rekonstruktive Gattung: Erzählerische Mittel und
Strategien bei der Rekonstruktion eines Bekehrungserlebnisses.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17.1
(1988): 19–33.
Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.
Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of
California Press, 1982.
164 1 Theoretical Approaches

Wu. Pey-Yi. The Confucian’s progress: Autobiographical writings in traditional China. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990.

Further Reading
Belzen, Jacob A., and Anton Geels. Autobiography and the Psychological Study of Religious Lives.
Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008.
Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, ed. Biographie und Religion. Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche. Frankfurt
a. M./New York: Campus, 1995.
Hahn, Alois. “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse:
Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozial­
psychologie 34 (1982): 407–434.
Knoblauch, Hubert, Volkhard Krech, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, eds. Religiöse Konversion. Syste­ma­
tische und fallorientierte Studien in sozioiogischer Perspektive. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag
Konstanz, 1998.
1.18 Rhetoric
Melanie Möller

Every autobiographic text is characterized by the tension between fiction and truth.
Rhetoric, too, is shaped by this basic problematic: not only can it provide the genre of
autobiography with linguistic methods and terminology; it can also supply a theoret­
ical framework for the discussion of the complex question of truth. So it is no wonder
that the first autobiographic texts mentioned belong to the field of rhetoric. And
yet just as ‘autobiography’ can scarcely be distinguished sharply from other textual
forms, so too a genre of ‘rhetoric’ can be extracted from the various generic contexts:
aside from overtly rhetorical texts (speeches, compendiums, and essays), rhetoric
influences all different kinds of literary formats. Even if the speeches were primarily
presented orally, it is very often a subsequently edited, written version, laden with
fictional elements, which came to us.
The successful story of rhetoric in the ancient world initially arises from the fact that
individual self-awareness gradually gained strength. The early Enlightenment-move­
ment of the so-called Sophistic considers the human being as an acting subject. So
with the genesis of rhetoric the speaker’s self, too, is up for consideration: the external
appearance of the speaker, his ἦθος (ethos), along with the dimensions of λόγος (logos)
(computation/reckoning) and πάθος (pathos, how the listener is affected) made up the
trilogy of ‘artificial evidence’. This division, which goes back to Aristotle, already hints
at the fictional scope available to speakers for the expression of the self and its sur­
roundings, whose development responds to the need to convince the audience. All
three instruments of persuasion operate with suggestive experience from the commu­
nicative practice. At the same time, the so-called Sophists use the pragmatic dimen­
sion to test the theoretical basis of language. Gorgias of Leontinoi (fifth century BCE)
already brought up the sore hermeneutical point of rhetoric with his speech theory: his
hypothesis about the semiotic heterogeneity of logos states that truth and perception
are fundamentally different and moreover are interpreted individually by every recipi­
ent (Gorgias 1982, 25). The groundwork has been laid for a theory of ‘pre-modern sub­
jectivity’ that is set up by the overlapping of appearance and reality, of facts and fiction.
Exactly here lie the reasons for the early-evolving, mainly philosophically moti­
vated criticism of rhetoric. Where rhetoric accepts the speech restriction of the world-
and self-perception and makes use of it, philosophy, in its doubt about the infallibility
of language, tries to establish a truth which is supposed to bind the depicted self as
well. Under these circumstances, the situation of rhetoric is apologetic from the begin­
ning, and so attempts of justification occur particularly in contexts where rhetoric is
valued and used as a constructive form of expression.
Among the critics Plato is mentioned very often. It becomes very evident from the
dialogue Phaidros (Plat. Phaidr. 258 d1) that Plato certainly does not condemn rhetoric
in general, but only the common practice of it. Rhetoric in the absence of truth does

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-019
166 1 Theoretical Approaches

not seem to him to be a scientifically validated art. The Platonic alternative would be
a rhetoric based on the dialectical method, which springs from true knowledge and
is founded on observation of the human ψυχή (psyche, soul). The speaker himself
carries most responsibility: Plato demands that he is truly good in order to be able to
both see and advise the best.
Aristotle understands the usefulness of rhetoric for everyday communication and
thus directs attention to its pragmatic dimension, which is to be seen as a close inter­
action of the three central dimensions that are involved in the communication process:
the above mentioned ‘logos’, ‘ethos’, and ‘pathos’. By ‘ethos’, Aristotle understands
a flexible category: it is only the speech itself that shows the speaker’s ‘ethos’ off to
full advantage. The speaker is supposed to make his moral disposition transparent
through the speech, the argumentation, and style (Aristotle 1991, 28–31). This ‘ethos’
oscillates between a real condition and a picture of one’s self, which is created by
the speech (Möller 2004, 86–89). The auditor (or reader) must judge whether the
speaker appears convincing and authentic. The reception is the integrative factor for
the ethos of the speaker. Thereby, the speaker is given tremendous room for unfold­
ing his self-conception, even if it underlies the dictate of appropriateness (gr. πρέπον
[prepon], lat. aptum), which was coined by social standardization and declared to be
a virtue of style.
After Aristotle, the social relevance of the rhetorically versed linguistic self-pres­
entation is taken more and more into account. The individual justifies his actions
primarily with the common welfare in mind by staging himself as a responsible part
of it (Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian). It goes without saying that here, facts and fiction
interpenetrate each other in a reasonable and moderate way. The ‘authorised speaker’
is committed to his personal, socially bound conscience. The earliest representative of
such a responsible ethic among speakers is the Greek Isocrates, who not only strongly
influences the Roman orators and philologists, but with his speech called Antidosis
(Περὶ τῆς ἀντιδόσεως, oratio 15) also composes the first autobiography in the narrower
sense of the genre. In Isocrates’ educational theory, steering rests with ‘logos’ when­
ever one thinks and acts, since no reasonable action can be considered, announced or
carried out without the aid of language (Isocrates 1980, vol. I, 109–111). Yet the ‘logos’,
with all its culturally foundational and norm-regulating power, cannot be thought
independent of the individual responsibility (‘apologia’) of the speaker (and the lis­
tener; Isocrates oratio 13, 10–14). The importance of the imitation of exemplary literary
archetypes (‘mimesis’/‘imitatio auctorum et morum’) is to be estimated highly. In the
Antidosis, Isocrates explains that the words spoken by a man of good reputation have
more persuasive power than those of a person with a doubtful name. In the preamble
of the autobiographic Antidosis, Isocrates exposes his personal intention: he wants
to present his character, his lifestyle and his educational ideal to his contemporaries
and later generations and thereby provide an authentic picture of his ‘ethos’ and his
whole life. Thus, he intends to include the reading directions for his life into the work
of art. With its literalization, the problem of the relation between ‘speech-speaker’
 1.18 Rhetoric 167

and ‘work-editor’ takes on a new dimension, which Isocrates also illustrates in the
Busiris (oratio 11): a written oeuvre mostly forms a unit with the name of the author
so that an immediate identification between what has been said and the character of
the author takes place. This demonstrates that for most recipients, life and art were no
separate spheres. By fabricating a written speech, the speaker creates an ideal picture
of himself that is designed for eternity.
This didactic-moral equipment of (autobiographic) self-fiction is reflected in the
Roman ideal of the ‘vir bonus dicendi peritus’ [‘the good man [is] eloquent’], which
was formulated by Cato the Elder, and it is also mirrored in its importance for the
orator of the future, the ‘orator perfectus’ (Cato 1860, 80). The ‘orator perfectus’
[‘perfect speaker’] thus defined is a roundly sophisticated philosophical speaker from
whose knowledge society benefits.
Cicero delivers the most detailed description of the ideal of this speaker. To achieve
reconciliation between philosophy and rhetoric, Cicero on the one hand quite conse­
quently clings to rhetoric’s claim for truth, which is supposed to have risen from social
practice: even fictional elements serve a pragmatic reality which accords with the
measures of probability. With regard to the speaker, Cicero on the other hand designs
a model that follows Aristotle, according to which the ‘ethos’ is a dynamic dimension
that is only realised through the medium of speech and its reception (Cic. orat. 26). The
‘imitatio auctorum’ is likewise to be seen as an essential element of Cicero’s educa­
tional concept; the imitation of good speakers does not however lead automatically to
the loss of one’s own style or to the levelling of individual differences, but leaves room
for individual diversity especially with regards to the self-referential passages. In the
background of this conception of the speaker-subject stands Cicero’s ‘persona’-theory,
which he develops in De officiis [On Duties] (Cicero 1991, 42–43). By ‘person’, Cicero
understands first and foremost the role a human being plays in society. This is not
without consequences for his concept of individuality: selection and standardization
of the ‘persona’ define how the individual is perceived by his social environment and
the way in which it takes part in different discursive practices. Continuity over a longer
period is also part of the ‘person’: thus, Cicero stresses especially from a social point
of view the protection of identity as a perpetuated social role. Continuity and identity
in this context are generally to be classified less as subjective than as social and con­
ventional factors. The fundamental question already for Cicero must be how much
diversity in structured systems – and as such do we imagine Cicero’s res publica as well
as Plato’s Politeia – can be controlled in practice. The exclusion of the implausible,
the restriction of the fictional, and the minimization of possible deviations from the
(ethical and stylistic) norm constitute the stability factor of the social system. The prin­
cipally inconsumable – art, its perception and rating, whose subjectivity Cicero by all
means concedes – needs to be converted into the communication coherence of society.
According to Cicero, the elder Seneca (Controversiae [‘Judicial Declamations’,
‘Contestations’]), along with Quintilian (Institutio oratoria [The Orator’s Education])
and Tacitus (Dialogus de oratoribus [‘A Dialogue on Speakers’]), remains commit­
168 1 Theoretical Approaches

ted to the socially and ethically determined speaker’s ideal. By proving the speech’s
dependency on the speaker’s moral nature (and philosophical education), one creates
a mostly merely apparent certainty, which suggests that one can ever classify the ora­
tor’s character and thus the quality of his speech.
The crisis of rhetoric increases in the post-classical period as the range of topics
gradually levels off and, as a consequence of the excessive practice of declamation,
becomes increasingly menacing. Furthermore, the prevalent rhetoric is accused of
losing touch with the truth and simultaneously neglecting the listeners’ pragmatic
needs. Where rhetoric not only wants to be a school subject but also to have social
influence, it has to practice subtle self-exegesis. The situation of rhetoric during the
imperial period, which culminates in the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’, is particularly
illuminating here. In the influential speeches of Aelius Aristides (second century CE),
a capacious theory of ‘logos’ is developed according to which education, knowledge
and rhetorical technique do not stand for themselves, but are to be regarded as a
representative part of the speaker’s overall personality (Aristides 1976, 268–269). This
concept of rhetoric is at the core elitist and it inherits a power which is useful for the
identity of the speaker himself and his community.
Likewise, Christian rhetoric submits the individual and the social groundwork of
rhetoric to a profound critique. The works of Augustine, who also played a significant
role in shaping the autobiographic tradition with his Confessiones [Confessions], attain
canonical status for future times. In his semiological work De doctrina christiana [On
Christian Doctrine], Augustine addresses the question of the oratorical ‘ethos’. The
fourth book of the tract, which is significant for the history of hermeneutics, analyses
the role of the author as subject and of rhetoric and language in general. To Augus­
tine, authenticity and harmony are the highest goals. This applies especially to the
relation between word and action in regard to the speaker’s person. Since words of
biblical texts are considered the property of all believers, a good Christian can utilize
the beautifully formed and therefore beneficial text of someone else. The premise
remains the moral integrity of the orator. In this respect, there is no contradiction
here with Augustine’s emphatic insistence on the polarization of the individual, when
he, following the example of the stoic ‘persona’-doctrine that Cicero spread, eulogizes
the individual as ‘God’s wonder’ (Augustinus 1972, 53–55). Ruthless speakers not only
steal from the common property available to all upright people, but also are alienated
from themselves (Augustinus 1962, 165–166). The rhetorically versed Christian autobi­
ography, as Augustinus represents it, aims at staging the self as an authentic, charac­
terful individual, which is subject to a divinely motivated self-control and operates for
itself and the community. The primary objective of the identity of character and ‘vita’
to which Augustine aspires is the vindication of one’s own language-bound action in
front of the public, for whom one wants to serve as an example worthy of imitation in
the sense of the ‘imitatio auctorum’.
Approximately at the end of the seventh century CE, the room for communica­
tion narrows down still further, and this has radical consequences for the rhetoric of
 1.18 Rhetoric 169

self-portrayal. That the social commitment of the self in relation to rhetoric remains
binding also for Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modernity was brought out by
Peter von Moos in cautious studies. He verifies the (in George Herbert Meads’ sense)
‘intersubjective interdependencies’ (von Moos 2004, 5): all endeavours of the individ­
ual to seek autonomy are to be considered – even in medieval times and the modern
age – ultimately as ‘phenomena of socialization’ (e. g. Johannes of Salisbury; von
Moos 2004, 7); the perfect nobleman mirrors the ‘vir bonus’-ideal that persisted from
the ancient world. The techniques of the ars poetriae that developed from the eleventh
until the thirteenth century CE and converged in poetics and rhetoric, those of the ‘ars
dictaminis/dictandi’ [‘art of composing prose’], ‘ars arengandi’ [‘art of conversation’]
or ‘ars praedicandi’ [‘art of preaching’], are characterized by school rhetoric and the
focus on the individual’s social responsibility especially where one wants to make a
difference through one’s own example. It is not without reason that the ‘imitatio auc­
toris’ comes to play a more and more important role.
In the Renaissance, with Humanism, a newly awakened interest in the theoretical
groundwork of communication can be witnessed. This grants rhetoric (which is also
fixed in the context of the ‘septem artes liberales’ [‘seven liberal arts’]) the status of a
leading science, which is, however, still at the command of the universally educated
scholar. There are attempts to restore Cicero’s ideal of the unity of speech and morals
(e. g. Lorenzo Valla, Rudolf Agricola, and Philipp Melanchthon). Overall, a ‘realistic
Anthropology’ is at the basis of all humanistic literature (Ueding 1995, 105): a compre­
hensive orientation towards the humanly possible, then, which does not have much
tolerance for auto-fictional elements. Rhetoric more and more veers towards other lit­
erary dimensions, e. g. the culture of letter-writing: most influential here was Erasmus
von Rotterdam with his treaty de conscribendis epistolis [On the Writing of Letters],
though he situates himself within the out-dated and apparently not very subversive
‘perspicuitas’-ideal of the rhetorical doctrine.
In the modern ages, the art of speech is favoured in the ‘genus laudativum’ [‘offi­
cial commemorative speeches’]. The tradition that was overlaid by artificial rhetoric
reaches an inglorious high point in the baroque period, as can be seen in the numerous
special elocutions for all different kinds of occasions. Here, the topical elements limit
the tolerance of expression of the self to the highest degree. Written rhetoric is culti­
vated further (e. g. Gerhard Johannes Vossius), while its practical-artistic dimension is
ever more marginalised. By contrast, rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment is entirely
devoted to reason, which turns out to be disadvantageous for its fictitious elements as
well. The rhetorical self-conceptions are overlaid by philosophically studious (auto-)
biography (Rousseau’s Confessions), which was supposed to present a structured
and modest existence (Vico, Rousseau). These individually constructed educational
stories, predecessors of the ‘Bildungsroman’ [‘education novel’], aim to display con­
sciousness of the coherence of one’s own experiences, and in this they definitely draw
on the conceptions of the self of early rhetoric (esp. Isocrates). In consequence of
the last-mentioned developments, the handbooks dealing with the history of ideas
170 1 Theoretical Approaches

around the year 1800 mark the so-called ‘end of rhetoric’, which not surprisingly coin­
cides with the birth of aesthetics as a discipline (Dachselt 2003, 169–171). From now
on, rhetoric ekes out a shadowy existence in schools and as a part of stylistics. The
suppression of rhetoric was effective not least because people increasingly failed to
see the point in it as interests gradually shifted from the general to the individual.
The theoretical potential of the rhetorical problem of impact with its consequences
in the history of thought was largely ignored over and above this practical limitation
due to the result of aggressive opposition to it in the romantic period. This is proba­
bly shown most vividly in Klaus Dockhorn’s psychological studies about Wordsworth,
which describe his poetry as determined by a “durch und durch auf einer irrational­
istischen Anthropologie beruhenden pathos-ethos-Formel” [‘a pathos-ethos-formula
which thoroughly rests upon an irrationalistic anthropology’] (Dockhorn 1968, 96).
Behind this intellectual incitement stands “das Recht der sprachlichen Gebärde, die
sich ästhetisch, nicht aber nach Kriterien der Logik fassen läßt” [‘the right of a lin­
guistic gesture which can be grasped aesthetically, but not by criteria of logics’] (Grod­
deck 1995, 86) and which, in the field of rhetoric, is driven by the ‘desideratum’ of
the individual ‘ingenium’ as well. The ‘ingenium’ is put as a combination of a unique
talent and an experience which can be acquired by making exercises in rhetorical
contexts.
These correlations initially take place implicitly. The most obvious foundation for
the rehabilitation of rhetoric is laid by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche associates lan­
guage with a “künstlerisch schaffende[m] Subjekt” [‘a subject creating art’], rhetoric
with a reflective mode for conversing as “ästhetischem Verhalten” [‘aesthetic relation’]
(Nietzsche 1979, 19). Where language allegedly insists on its own naturalness, it is said
merely to have forgotten its figurative origin. For Nietzsche, rhetoric is the centre of
life; since its status is that of an obvious art neither doubted nor interpreted as being
proof of an ontological deficit, the illusory notion of life itself becomes a requirement
of human existence that cannot be eluded. Thereby, Nietzsche directly ties in with the
complex pseudo-topic, which had helped in bringing about the genesis of rhetoric
as nomenclature of speech-theoretical thinking and auto-fictional reflection: in this
sense, he can refer to the “griechische[n] Begriff der Cultur […] als einer Einhelligkeit
zwischen Leben, Denken, Scheinen und Wollen” [“Greek conception of culture […] as
a unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will”] (Nietzsche 1972, 123 [1997, 122]).
Illusion remains subservient to reality; one cannot hold on to a dichotomy between
the two categories from the point of view of language criticism, which unavoidably
judges rhetoric to be the only possible way of thinking and living. Nietzsche also
points to a distinct disruption of traditional attempts at coherency, when he labels
the ego a series of (fragmented) self-conceptions (Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Antiquity).
At the same time, the obligatory topos of sincerity is questioned, and increasingly
literary, social and national conditions are invoked against naïve concepts of autobi­
ography. Autobiography is exposed as a volitional act of memory that works with topoi
of rhetorically codified perception patterns (Dachselt 2003, 97).
 1.18 Rhetoric 171

These insights that were inaugurated by Nietzsche are radicalized during the
twentieth century in literary theory and philosophy (esp. in the theory of deconstruc­
tion). In Roland Barthes’ paper L’ancienne Rhétorique [‘The ancient Rhetoric’], the art
of rhetoric appears as the legitimate predecessor of literary structuralism: out of its
proper referential system sense and meaning, in poststructuralist phrases, infinite
reference systems should be made accessible without having to refer back to concepts
like ‘concrete realities’ or ‘reliable signs’ (Barthes 1970). Under these circumstances,
authentic self-expression becomes an ‘adynaton’.
That not only the subject as external phenomenon but also one’s own identity –
considered in self-reflexive processes – is a discursive effect has become a banal
insight, if not a commonplace. The hence-deducible permeability and performance
of identity has its roots in the ancient ‘persona’-theory, which unveils the ego as a dis­
cursive effect, fragment synthesis and role selection. The diagnosis of the performa­
tivity of the I-figure is an anthropological constant, which reveals particularly well
the intellectual history of the art of speech. Paul de Man in his Allegories of Reading
(1982) went as far as to rate autobiography itself as a kind of rhetorical figure (even
with regard to the local disposition of the linguistic segments).
The situation of rhetoric henceforth is one of social and communicative struggles
to convey ideas. Hans Blumenberg, following Arnold Gehlen, argues that the genesis
of rhetoric occurs because of a ‘truth constraint’ of men, thus because of a specific
shortage. Rhetoric directly determines the human being’s status as a “Mängelwesen”
[‘deficient being’], because it comes to be proof of its inevitable dependence from
speech (Blumenberg 1981, 407). When judging favourably, “Sprachwerdung” [‘becom­
ing speech’], which implies its transformation into speech, is declared to be “Human­
isierung” [‘humanization’], as far as, in pragmatic terms “[n]ur in der Sprache […] sich
die verhängnisvolle Inkongruenz von Handeln und Bewußtsein auf[hebt]” [‘only in
language the fatal incongruity of acting and consciousness is revoked’] (Blumenberg
1961, 68). Cicero’s aesthetical and at the same time pragmatic concept of the orator
as one who acts through speaking is illuminated by this: at the hands of the orator,
speech, illusion and truth can step into an appropriate relationship with each other.
Already here, through the production of a ‘speech act’, reality is generated. On the
other hand we find a type of rhetoric that, with the argumentation theory, again puts
‘logos’ in the centre (‘New Rhetoric’/Nouvelle Rhétorique). In its non-relativistic form,
as represented by Chaim Perelman, it takes into account the comparatively statically
composed ‘ethos’ primarily under juridical-pragmatic aspects (Olbrechts-Tyteca and
Perelmann 1958).
Yet, since this is the reception of rhetorical anthropology, the human remains
enmeshed in his or her figurativeness. The self is a result of communication, it cor­
responds to a process of interpretation between different common instances. So
poststructuralism rightly appraises hermeneutics and rhetoric as analogues. In the
‘autobiographical pact’ with the reader (Lejeune 1989) complicity is manifested,
which represents a further component of the confession of one’s own inaccuracy.
172 1 Theoretical Approaches

The inter-subjective contact is at the centre, too, of every ‘act’ of rhetoric, so it is per
se based on a communication contract. Aside from systems theory from the field of
sociology, it is this last insight that has particularly influenced speech act theory and
pragmatics. Both insist on the interdependency of discursive and social procedures.
Autobiography in this way seems like a product of communication in its full sense.
In the political relevance of rhetoric, too, which is primarily analyzed by Josef Kop­
perschmidt, this becomes important: political autobiography in this sense is a repre­
sentative proof of a life plan which is drafted from different kinds of media (Kopper­
schmidt 2000).
Life as the sum of its (rhetorically modified) parts is always ‘written’ and not
‘de-scribed.’ There is also the fact that even the writing style performatively depends
on the past of the writer and the present of the procedure of writing itself (Starobinski
1998, 201). The unity of the portrayal of a life, which is both orally conceptualized
and fixed in a written form, can only ever be temporary, suggested, and hence rhetor­
ically evoked. It is also this insight, which stokes longings for authenticity – the plea
for a truth, which admittedly might not be consistent with reality, but nevertheless
avows for a certain consistency in self-presentation. This desire has, against better
judgement, taken over literary theory (Michel Foucault’s lectures about parrhesia: The
Government of Self and Others, Foucault 2011, 62–64; Möller 2012, 112–113). Rhetoric
is possibly the only discipline that has always faced up to this unavoidable truth, and
because of this attitude with no illusions – as the art of illusion per se – has been
treated with hostility like no other.

Translation: Emily Baragwanath, Melanie Möller, Anna Westerberg

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Groddeck, Wolfram. Reden über Rhetorik. Zu einer Stilistik des Lesens. Basel/Frankfurt a. M.:
Stroem­feld/Nexus, 1995.
Isocrates. Isocrates in Three Volumes. Ed. George Norlin. Cambridge, M. A.: Harvard University
Press, 1980.
Kopperschmidt, Josef. Rhetorische Anthropologie. Studien zum homo rhetoricus. München: Fink,
2000.
Lejeune, Philippe. “The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans.
­Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
Möller, Melanie. Talis oratio – Qualis vita. Zu Theorie und Praxis mimetischer Verfahren in der
griechisch-römischen Literaturkritik. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004.
Möller, Melanie. “Am Nullpunkt der Rhetorik? Michel Foucault und die parrhesiastische Rede.”
Parrhesia. Foucault und der Mut zur Wahrheit. Ed. Petra Gehring and Andreas Gelhard. Zürich:
Diaphanes, 2012. 103–120.
Moos, Peter von, ed. Unverwechselbarkeit. Persönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormoder-
nen Gesellschaft. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2004.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen II: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für
das Leben.“ Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Dritte Abteilung, Erster Band. Ed.
Giorgo Colli, Mazzino Montinari,Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Gerhardt Volker. Berlin/New York: De
Gruyter, 1972. 239–330. [“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Medita-
tions. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 57–123.]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Philosophy and Truth: Selections
from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities, 1979. 79–91.
Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, and Chaim Perelmann. Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique.
Bruxelles: Éditions de l’université des Bruxelles, 1958.
Plato. Opera. Parmenides. Philebus. Symposium. Phaedrus. Alcibiades I + II. Hipparchus. Amatores.
Tom. II. Ed. Ioannis Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901.
Ueding, Gert. Klassische Rhetorik. München: Beck, 1995.
Starobinski, Jean. “Der Stil in der Autobiographie.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte
einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Duncker & Humblot, 2nd ed. 1998.
200–213.
174 1 Theoretical Approaches

Further Reading
Fohrmann, Jürgen, ed. Rhetorik. Figuration und Performanz. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004.
Frank, Manfred, and Anselm Haverkamp, eds. Individualität. München: Fink, 1988.
Mainberger, Gonsalv K. “Rhetorik und wildes Denken. Ein Zugang zum Mythos über Aristoteles.”
Rhetorik. Vol. II. Ed. Josef Kopperschmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1991. 408–441.
Metzger, Stefan, and Wolfgang Rapp, eds. homo inveniens. Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell
der Rhetorik. Tübingen: Narr, 2003.
Möller, Melanie. Ciceros Rhetorik als Theorie der Aufmerksamkeit. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
Winter, 2013.
1.19 Social History
Helga Schwalm

While autobiography tends to be allocated a peripheral place only in the social histo­
riography of literature (e. g. Rath 1997, 315; Schneider 2004, 240–241; exception: Ford
1983), auto/biography and social history are entwined along several lines. Labelled
‘autobiography’, ‘life writing’, ‘self-testimony’, and also more recently ‘ego-docu­
ments’ (Dekker 2002), writings about one’s own person are located at a significant
interface between subjectivity and social objectivity and as such inform social, cul­
tural and literary history. Whereas historians since Leopold Ranke had long dispar­
aged autobiography as a source, suspecting it to be unreliable and untrustworthy
given its “romanhafte Bestandteile” [‘novelistic elements’] (Glagau 1903, 6), it was
rediscovered by historians of ideas such as Georg Misch (1950) and Jacob Burckhardt
(1989 [1860]). The turn to narrative history and the advent of micro-history in the 1980s
further lifted the value of autobiography as a privileged source for social and cultural
history, and autobiographies in fact continue to be exploited by social historians for
empirical data (e. g. Humphries 2010). Moreover, even though the simplistic notion of
autobiography as a mimetic, realistic representation of life has long been discarded,
autobiography is considered to offer the historian a ‘perspective from below’ (Ueding
1987, 368), or ‘bottom-up’. History is illuminated through personal experience, reveal­
ing above all the subjective experience of social structures, changes etc., as well as
interpretative configurations such as life-course patterns and the everyday knowledge
thereof. Life writing viewed in a socio-historical context thus sheds light on cultural
habits and practices of social groups/classes rather than mere individuals. Of primary
interest is the autobiographer as a member of a group – such as a factory worker
turned Chartist, or a former slave as in American slave narratives (e. g. Dorsey 1993).
What such approaches to autobiography share is the concern with a self-re­
flective, or explicit, subjectivity articulating itself within a particular contextual/
pragmatic framework and with specific functions such as understanding one’s own
motives at a time of crisis, explaining one’s motives and actions to others, self-justi­
fication, apology etc. (Kohli 1980). None of the manifold forms and modes of literary
and non-literary self-representation are exclusively individual but created within spe­
cific social and cultural frameworks and contexts including socio-historically specific
cultures of memory. Autobiographical self-representations are embedded in institu­
tional structures and depend on culturally available institutional frames, schemata
and textual models that generate particular discourses: “The kind of biographical
identity or textual self one has depends on the historically and culturally varying
forms of biography generators” (Hahn 1998, 27). Confessions in particular played a
crucial role in the development of the modern self and modern autobiography with its
dictates of self-revelation and self-censorship. At the other end of the historical scale,
contemporary autobiographical practices variously engage with popular intermedial

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176 1 Theoretical Approaches

genres (graphic autobiography) and internet forms of self-writing and self-articulation

(online-life writing).
In any case, it is only through an engagement with such models in the context of
available biography generators that individuals may conceive of and construct them­
selves. It is at this point that the life history approach in the social sciences intersects
with the notion of intertextuality prevalent in literary studies. While biographical pre­
texts provide structures which make narrating one’s individual life possible in the first
place, they also carry cultural knowledge of socially possible and acceptable lives in
the sense of life world or experiential knowledge. As such, they belong to the patterns
of knowledge and meaning beneath the level of reflexive or theoretical knowledge
(Willems and Willems 2001, 398), which will itself eventually be effected by individual
rewritings in terms of a restructuring and modification of mental schemata.
The social historiography of literature, too, addresses autobiographies as docu­
ments indicative of and reflecting trans-individual socio-historical structures, config­
urations and trends. As such, it intersects with a number of disciplines next to literary
studies – history, economics, sociology, psychology, education. Unlike the life-history
approach in the social sciences, which not only studies autobiographical documents
of all sorts in order to explore specific biographical patterns, role identities etc., but
also actively invites self-representations by way of narrative interviews (subsequently
transcribed by social scientists), literary studies tend to be concerned only with texts
composed as self-representations and to explicitly acknowledge and theorize the inev­
itable generic ambiguity of autobiographical writing, allowing for no distinct divid­
ing-line between fact and fiction. Whatever the degree of aesthetic construction or liter­
ary claim, autobiographical texts written as autobiographies in various forms originate
from specific pragmatic purposes, they may not have been intended for publication
originally or may have been altered and shaped for publication purposes by editors.
A particular emphasis regarding the social history of autobiography is placed on
the lower classes or those that do not pertain to the social and cultural elites, explor­
ing autobiography especially with regard to literacy, education, and reading practices
(e. g. Vincent 1982; Rose 2001; Richardson 1994; Messerli 2010). At the same time,
autobiography features as a key site in the socio-cultural history of configurations
of selfhood. In this sense, Mahrholz’s early contention still holds that autobiogra­
phy provides social historiography with “the clearest reflection of the most recent
attitudes of the individual to his [and her, H. S.] surroundings, to his time, to the
thoughts and feelings that dominate it” (1919; Trans.: Jones 2011, 26). This implies
a broader understanding of autobiography as historical testimony extending to the
history of mentalities and ideas: Autobiography appears as a privileged historical
source concerning ‘the selves we live by’ (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Autobiogra­
phy, for instance, has played a key role in the emergence of the individualist self, or
modern individual (Wuthenow 1980; Mascuch 1997 etc.).
With regard to the historical nexus of autobiography and concepts of selfhood,
much scholarly attention has been paid to the interplay of the proliferation and diver­
 1.19 Social History 177

sity of life writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the evolution of auto­
biography as a literary genre ca. 1800 (separating it both from exemplary spiritual
autobiography and from memoirs), and the emergence of the modern, self-consciously
individualist self. Following Mahrholz’s tying of autobiography and the bourgeois
individual, Bernd Neumann (1970) established a typology of autobiographical forms
based on social psychology. Aligning different conceptions of identity with specific
narrative modes, his seminal distinction is between the external orientation of res
gestae and memoir, which rely on the factual and seek to confirm the individual’s
place in the world, as opposed to autobiography, which focuses on memory and iden­
tity (Neumann 1970, esp. 25).
While close ties between autobiography as literary genre and the modern bour­
geois individual have been established against the backdrop of a newly propagated
dignity of ordinary life as well as an increased social (and geographical) mobility,
this does not apply to all of European, let alone non-European cultures, and it is a
class- and gender-specific phenomenon, initially pertaining to Protestants and intel­
lectuals (Wuthenow 1980), and to the middle classes. Indeed, the figure of the secular,
autonomous autobiographical subject as it flourished ca. 1800 pertained to a small
canon of literary texts only, leaving the wider practice of life writing in England, for
instance, during this period of social and cultural transition seemingly untouched
(Treadwell 2005). However, the ‘elite phenomenon’ of modern autobiography as a
literary genre came to be canonized, incorporating the autobiographical subject as
author of its own, secular story of personality formation. In the wider context of nine­
teenth-century culture, with the cultural hegemony of the middle class, this literary
model merged into a more widely articulated subjectivity defined by “a mixture of
introspective self-consciousness, middle class familialism and genderization, and
liberal autonomy”, along with notions of freedom and creativity (Gagnier 1991, 28) –
a notion of the self that the concomitant nineteenth-century novel was to negotiate,
too, prominently by way of the ‘Bildungsroman’.
The individualism in life writing since the latter part of the nineteenth-century
was, however, not ubiquitous. With regard to German autobiographies of the 1920s,
Sloterdijk distinguishes between the “Symptom-System-Schema” (‘symptom-system
pattern’) of middle-class autobiography on the one hand and the “Fall-Typus-Schema”
(‘case-type pattern’) of proletarian autobiography. Whereas the individual features as
symptom and symbol of a whole (epoch or ‘Zeitgeist’) in the former, the latter con­
ceives of the autobiographical subject as a (typical) case among many (Sloterdijk 1978,
305). Autobiography thus prominently testifies to the different class-specific ‘logics of
representation’ (Warneken 2010, 178).
If on the one hand, socio-historically informed studies of life writing have yielded
socio-historical data as well as shed light especially on the role of autobiography in
discursive transformation processes pertaining to concepts of the self, the seemingly
inextricable ties of life writing genres with (Western) subjectivity have been disentan­
gled on the other hand. As Mascuch (1997) has shown for early modern commonplace
178 1 Theoretical Approaches

books, which allowed little room for any individualized entry, such modes of writing
did not necessarily generate any subjectivity in terms of articulating and reflecting
upon individual personal experience. Neither did the conversion stories of spiritual
autobiographies cater much for individual reflection but rather served as highly
standardized, non-individualized examples.
Furthermore, the manifold changes in technology concerning writing, reading,
printing, and marketing as well as institutional control mechanisms are seen to have
crucially contributed to the emergence of modern autobiography not (only) as a liter­
ary genre but as a cultural practice (Mascuch 1997). Likewise, the new social media
have generated new modes of self-presentation and of fashioning biographical iden­
tity that require fresh theoretical approaches to the mediality of life writing as practice
(e. g. Dünne and Moser 2008).
While, then, the field of life writing has suggested interdisciplinary approaches
informing social, cultural and mental histories, a socio-historically orientated study of
life writing is also pertinent to a social history of literature that addresses the interre­
lation of literature on the one hand and the historical life practice and everyday world
on the other hand. Firstly, autobiographers position themselves as authors and pro­
prietors of their own texts, suggesting a close link between autobiography and modern
authorship. The nominal claim of authorship on the title page is indeed the hallmark
of modern autobiography. At the same time, many autobiographers did not write with
publication in view and may explicitly reflect on or imply the absence of a notion
of authorship for themselves, as was the case particularly for woman writers before
the nineteenth century. The English novelist Fanny Burney’s diary, for instance,
testifies to her embarrassment concerning her identity as novelist and expresses her
doubts over her autobiographical writing, which she self-consciously addresses to
“Miss Nobody” (Burney 1988). Burney’s autobiographical writing, like that of many
other women, was never intended for a wider audience beyond her immediate family
members and was published posthumously. Secondly, autobiographies construct and
invite a reading as non-fiction that distinguishes them from fictional forms of auto­
biographical narratives. The reader is required and anticipated to possess a certain
degree of competence with respect to generic codes in order to be able to enter into the
‘autobiographical pact’, i. e. to read a given autobiography as a non-fictional account
of the author’s life told by him- or herself as proclaimed on the title page (Lejeune
1975). It is by way of the autobiographical pact sealed by the nominal identity of
author, narrator, and protagonist that autobiography claims referentiality, independ­
ent of the possibility that individual components may be altered or even made up.
In the absence of explicit paratextual pronouncements of referentiality, the reader is
asked to discern the intratextual clues pointing to the generic status of autobiograph­
ical narratives, to identify ‘signposts of fictionality’ (Cohn 1999) as opposed to the
lack thereof in factual narratives. Again, such clues are subject to historical change
and frequently afford no clear dividing-line between fact and fiction. In this context,
Binjamin Wilkomirski’s hotly debated ‘literary crime’ to pass off his narrative of a
 1.19 Social History 179

Holocaust childhood as autobiographical memoir (Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit

1939–1948 [1995] [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996)]) was really
one of feigning the autobiographical pact while leaving no signposts of fiction, not of
making up the story of his Holocaust survival, or parts of it, in the first place.
Thirdly, the anticipated audience comes into play as autobiographical narrative
addresses a reader (even if “Miss Nobody”) or has a particular audience in mind,
an aspect of the pragmatics of autobiography that determines not only processes of
reading, but the form, selection of events, tenor, rhetoric of autobiographies. Many
working-class life writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance,
addressed their fellow workers for didactic purposes. In other cases, the middle-class
interest in working-class writers, along with publishers’ and reviewers’ control over
publishing opportunities and critical reception, would have almost inevitably influ­
enced the quality of their writing; the practices of selection by publishers, the antic­
ipated market-value and anticipated horizon of expectations must have significantly
shaped self-representations intended for publication – to the point of self-censorship.
A story of social rise as singular career would almost certainly have vindicated existing
conditions (e. g. Bertram Some Memories of Books, Authors and Events [1893]), possibly
playing to the tune of publishers guided by market interests. In contrast, an emphasis
on the collective nature of proletarian biography, on events and experiences shared
by one’s fellow-men (e. g. Thomson’s Autobiography of an Artisan [1847]; Petzold’s Das
rauhe Leben [‘Rough Life’] [1920]), aims rather at ‘biographical solidarity’ (Sloterdijk
1978, 315), expressing a collective identity and refuting the bourgeois individualism
underlying autobiography as genre.
Finally, reading as represented in life writing also reveals empirical issues of the
reception and canonization of literature pertaining to specific social groups. While
testifying to the gendering of reading habits (Schneider 2004, 240), the narratives of
working-class autobiographers, more specifically, frequently give an account – from
the perspective of personal experience – of the autobiographer’s literary education,
reading preferences and literary epiphanies, access to books and modes of reception.
The role of literature in the historical processes of (literary) literacy thus comes to the
fore, and as such, autobiography also plays a part in the historiography of education.
At the same time, life writing ‘from below’ documents the social transmission and
reach of literary and cultural configurations that, seen from the perspective of ‘high
culture’, appear to be firmly established in a given period. English labouring-class
autobiographers in the nineteenth century, for instance, testify to the almost complete
absence of Romantic authors as opposed to the presence of an older canon until the
advent of Charles Dickens (whose novels offered a script for the ‘poor-boy-makes-
good’ plot).
Thus, autobiographical writing practices are pertinent to social history in mani­
fold ways, revealing the interactions between historical everyday lives and writing and
reading practices as well as articulating modes and patterns of biographical experi­
ence and identity.
180 1 Theoretical Approaches

Works Cited
de Bruyn, Günter. Das erzählte Ich: Über Wahrheit und Dichtung in der Autobiographie. Frank-
furt a. M.: Fischer, 1995.
Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ed. Horst Guenther. Frankfurt a. M.:
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Burney, Fanny. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Ed. Lars Troide. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988–2012.
Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality.” Poetics Today 1 (1990): 753–774.
Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Dekker, Rudolf, ed. Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in its Social Context since
the Middle Ages. Hilversum: Verloren, 2002.
Dorsey, Peter. Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser, eds. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen
Medien. München: Fink, 2008.
Ford, Boris, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. The Present. Vol. VIII. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1983.
Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991.
Glagau, Hans. Die moderne Selbstbiographie als historische Quelle: Eine Untersuchung. Marburg:
Elwert, 1903.
Hahn, Alois. “Narrative Identity and Auricular Confession as Biography-Generators.”
Self, Soul, and Body in Religious Experience. Ed. Albert I. Baumgarten. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
27–52.
Holstein, James, and Jaber Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
Jones, Sara. Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011.
Kohli, Martin. “Zur Theorie der biographischen Selbst- und Fremdthematisierung.” Lebenswelt
und soziale Probleme. Soziologentag Bremen. Ed. Joachim Matthes. Bremen: Campus, 1980.
502–520.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [“The Autobiographical
Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30].
Mahrholz, Werner. Deutsche Selbstbekenntnisse. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Selbst­biographie
von der Mystik bis zu Pietismus. Berlin: Furche, 1919.
Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England,
1591–1791. Cambridge: Polity, 1997.
Messerli, Alfred. “Leser, Leserschichten und -gruppen, Lesestoffe in der Neuzeit (1450–1850):
Konsum, Rezeptionsgeschichte, Materialität.” Buchwissenschaft in Deutschland: Ein Hand-
buch. Ed. Ursula Rautenberg. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. 443–502.
Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I. London: Routledge and Paul,
1950.
Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang: Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a. M.:
Athenäum, 1970 [New edition as Von Augustinus zu Facebook. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der
Autobiographie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013].
 1.19 Social History 181

Rath, Wolfgang. “Romane und Erzählungen der siebziger bis neunziger Jahre (BRD).” Deutsche
Literatur zwischen 1945 und 1995. Eine Sozialgeschichte. Ed. Horst Glaser. Bern: Haupt, 1997.
309–328.
Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism. Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class. New Haven: Yale University Press,
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Schneider, Jost. Sozialgeschichte des Lesens: Zur historischen Entwicklung und sozialen Differen­
zierung der literarischen Kommunikation in Deutschland. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Literatur und Lebenserfahrung, Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung.
Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre. München: Hanser, 1978.
Treadwell, James. Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
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Ueding, Gert. Klassik und Romantik. Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution
1789–1815. Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur
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Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of nineteenth-century Working Class Auto-
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Warneken, Bernd. Populare Kultur. Gehen – Protestieren – Erzählen – Imaginieren. Köln: Böhlau,
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Fremd- und Selbstthematisierung in soziologisch-historischer Perspektive. Ed. Cornelia Bohn
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Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. “Autobiographien und Memoiren, Tagebücher, Reiseberichte.” Deutsche
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148–169.

Further Reading
Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms.
Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.
Krüger, Heinz-Hermann, and Winifried Marotzki. Handbuch erziehungswissenschaftliche Biogra-
phieforschung. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1999.
Kuismin, Anna. White Field, Black Seeds: Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century.
Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2013.
1.20 Sociology
Gabriele Rosenthal

In sociology, biographical research is an internationally established sub-discipline

with a genuine theoretical basis and methodology of its own. These are embedded
in the tradition of ‘verstehende’ or interpretive sociology, and follow the idea that
scientific explanations of the social world must refer to the subjective meaning of
the actions of human beings and explain their actions and the consequences of their
actions through their interdependency with the actions of others (Schütz 1962). In
German sociology this approach is mainly based on sociology of knowledge in the
tradition of Alfred Schütz, symbolic interactionism in the tradtion of George Herbert
Mead, and social constructivism as developed by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luck­
mann. In their book The social construction of reality (1966), Berger and Luckmann
proposed the underpinning for a fundamental social theory for examining questions
such as how social order is created, how it is maintained, and how it changes. In their
conception, and in that of interpretive sociology generally, humans are not seen as
puppets dependent on social structures, at the mercy of social norms and institu­
tions, but as actors with their own power of interpretation and their own power of
agency, which always have a creative quality. As shown by Berger and Luckmann, the
individual is faced with social reality as an ‘objective reality’, but on the other hand
this reality is constituted by ‘subjective’ construction processes. The main purpose of
biographical research is to reconstruct actors’ subjective constructions, and to show
how these have emerged and changed in the course of their life history. Important for
the way the sociologist, or the social scientist in general, understands others, is the
principle formulated by Alfred Schütz (1962) that sociological constructions should
be based on constructs of everyday life-world and that the mental objects of the social
sciences must remain consistent with those which are formed by people in their every­
day lives. This requires that social researchers find out how the actors construct their
own reality, in other words how they experience their world, how they interpret this
world, and which methods of communication they use in the process. The constitu­
tion of social reality takes place in interactive processes which depend on how the
actors interpret the situation. However, these interpretations are not arbitrary and
are not based on the individual’s ‘lone’ psychic processes. Rather, they are based on
stocks of knowledge internalized and shared with others in the course of socialization,
what might be called collective stocks of knowledge, which contain rules for action
and interaction, and which lead to different subjective interpretations and implemen­
tations in concrete contexts of activity, depending on the biographical situation. In
other words, in his interpretations or constructions of meaning, the individual has
recourse to collective stocks of knowledge. The way these are spelled out and applied
will always vary according to the person’s life history and experiences, and they will
always require creative application arising from the reflections of the individual in

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-021
 1.20 Sociology 183

the concrete situation. In the course of his or her socialization, the individual learns
in which settings biographical thematizations are expected and the rules according
to which these are produced. The settings in which biographical thematizations are
required or socially desired, or not desired, differ in the same way as the social rules
concerning which areas and phases of life may or should be discussed, and how, and
which should not, vary from culture to culture, from milieu to milieu, from nation to
nation, and even from family to family. Thus, for example, migrants, who have been
socialized in different cultures and political units (such as states), may have learned
and internalized very different collective rules regarding biographical self-themati­
zation and thematization by others (Apitzsch and Siuoti 2015; Bogner and Rosenthal
2017). Social, institutional, organizational, group and family-specific rules, or the
rules for different discourses, lay down what can or should be thematized, and what
not, as well as how, when and in which contexts.
As a result of biographical self-thematization and thematization by others in dif­
ferent situations and social contexts, people develop biographical constructions in
the course of their lives which help them to interpret their life, i. e. to give a meaning
to their past, present and future, and thus to gain an orientation for their actions and
their lives. These constructions have similar functions in processes of understanding
others, or trying to understand how and why other people have become what they
are and act the way they do. This work of construction, which must be constantly
repeated or continued by the individual autobiographer in social interactions, is
carried out with the aid of socially predefined patterns (e. g. patterns prespecified by
a collectivity, or rather by several collectivities), which are partly institutionalized and
partly internalized in the course of socialization. Neither these patterns, nor the work
of construction carried out with their help, can ever be a (purely) individual matter.
These constructions may solidify in the course of a life, but they are also repeatedly
modified, and in particular they repeatedly require a new interpretation of the past in
the light of the changing present and changing imagined future(s) in the context of
changing and critical life situations. The biography of an individual is thus repeatedly
recreated in the changing presents of narration or writing.
In sociological biographical research, the life stories narrated or presented in bio­
graphical narrative interviews are the main instrument used for reconstructing the
individual’s stock of knowledge, its genesis in the course of a person’s life, biograph­
ical self-presentations, social actions (and experiences) and social milieus (Schütze
2005, 2007; Rosenthal 1995, 2003). However, biographical thematizations in everyday
or organization contexts, written and published autobiographies, biographical (and
family) documents (photo albums, diaries, letters, etc.), and personal records (life-
course data in court proceedings, personal files in political parties, medical histories,
etc.), and especially a combination of these materials, are also used as sources of data.
Life stories are perceived as suitable sociological material for reconstructing patterns
of interpretation and social actions. With a concentration on single cases and the use
of qualitative-interpretive methods, the research first focused on the individual biog­
184 1 Theoretical Approaches

raphy with the intention of making sense of and accounting for particular life expe­
riences or phases within the context of a person’s life. With the central aim of using
microscopic interpretive and qualitative studies in order to be able to take into account
the perspectives of the actors and their communities, as well as their specific geo­
graphical and historical circumstances, biographical research follows Max Weber’s
conception of social science as a ‘science of concrete reality’, as opposed to sciences
such as theoretical physics or economic theory that set out to discover general laws
for the activities of their subject matter (Rossi 1987, 7–62; Kruse 1990). Weber postu­
lated sociology as “a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social
action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects”
(1994, 228). However, its aim is not only to analyze subjective meaning or individual
cases, but to do justice to the mutual constitution of individuals and societies. Life-
story and collective historical processes are examined empirically in their ineluctable
interrelationship. Biographical research focuses on the decoding and investigation of
the linkages and interferences – in other words the inseparable unity – of individual
and collective histories, of ‘individuals’ and ‘society’. That societies are constituted
by individuals seems to be an obvious and easily comprehensible fact. However, the
deceptive notion of an additive or summative connection, in the manner of classical
mechanics, may easily creep in here. The reverse connection is harder to understand –
the constitution of individuals, including their interpretations of their life and the way
they live, by collective or ‘societal’ structures and forces.

History
Sociological biographical research began at the University of Chicago in the 1920s,
in association with the migration study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by
William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1958). This research was on cultural
identity and social change in the Polish immigrant community in the United States,
and to this day the biographical approach is a prominent method used in the sub-dis­
cipline of sociology of migration (Breckner, 2007; Siouti 2016). Even in this first study
on migration by Thomas and Znaniecki, empirical work was already concentrated
on the single case study. Alongside a documentary analysis of the migration process
(based especially on collections of letters between the home country, Poland, and the
USA), this voluminous work contains only one autobiography of a Polish migrant com­
missioned by the researchers. The authors even go so far as to claim that “life-records
have a marked superiority over any other kinds of materials. We are safe in saying that
personal life-records, as complete as possible, constitute the perfect type of sociolog­
ical material” (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958, 1832).
It was not the concrete biographical analysis that made this work so influential
for subsequent interpretive sociology and biographical research, as much as the two
 1.20 Sociology 185

authors’ general methodological comments. One of the most important of these was
their remark that “social science cannot remain on the surface of social becoming,
where certain schools wish to have it float, but must reach the actual human expe­
riences and attitudes which constitute the full, live and active social reality beneath
the formal organization of social institutions” (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958, II, 1834).
Biographical research, inspired by this study, blossomed at the Sociology Depart­
ment in Chicago during the 1920s at the initiative of Ernest W. Burgess (1886–1966)
and Robert E. Park (1864–1944). Researchers inspired by the idea of getting inside of
the actor’s perspective now recognized the advantages of the biographical case study
for recording the ‘subjective perspectives’, the constructions of meaning generated by
members of various milieus. Clifford Shaw’s classical case study of a young criminal,
published in 1930, was also basically inspired by Thomas and Park. Shaw observed
Stanley, as he calls him, over a period of six years, and also got him to write an auto­
biographical report. In his analysis, Shaw discusses not only the genesis of a delin­
quent career, but underlines that for the diagnosis and treatment of delinquents their
‘own history’ is important.
In the 1970s sociology increasingly began re-examining the work of the Chicago
School, leading to a boom in interpretive biographical research. The first anthology
of biographical research was published in Germany in 1978 by Martin Kohli, and an
international reader by French sociologist Daniel Bertaux followed in 1981 (Bertaux
and Kohli 1984). This field of research is expanding to this day in various specialist
disciplines. In sociology today, biographies are increasingly considered and examined
as a social construct of social reality in themselves (Kohli 1986; Fischer and Kohli
1987), whereas initially, written or narrated biographies were mainly used as a means
of data collection, as a source of specific information. Over the last 20 years, in the
field of sociological biographical research an intergenerational perspective and an
elaborate conception of family history have become established, involving the anal­
ysis of interconnected biographies of multiple generations within a family (in the
wider sense of a cross-generational kin network). Daniel Bertaux and others have
postulated that we need to use family history as the appropriate level for case studies,
as opposed to individual biographies (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame 1997; Bohler and
Hildenbrand 1995; Rosenthal 2010, 2012). This was an important step towards over­
coming an ahistorical perspective and embedding biographies within the diachronic
context of social history. The case level of family histories and a timeframe oriented
towards several generations – unlike the level of individual life stories – enables us
to reconstruct the processes of development and change in social phenomena over
the ‘longue durée’ and to analyze the family history in its interrelationship with the
history of larger groupings or collectivities (Bertaux and Delcroix 2000). A socio-his­
torical timeframe that includes several generations of the same family – which may
cover up to five generations in interviews with three-generation families – allows us
to bridge the gaps between the micro, meso, and macro levels of enquiry (Bertaux
and Thompson 1997, 12). Reconstructions that carefully use thick descriptions of life
186 1 Theoretical Approaches

and family histories in their intertwining with collective processes of transforma­

tion allow not only for a consideration of the interdependency of macro and micro
levels of enquiry (or society and individual), they also allow for the construction of
bridges between the various disciplines. Norbert Elias (1991) discussed the interde­
pendency between the structures of individuals and the social or collective struc­
tures, and made clear that “transformation at the level of society can only be under­
stood in the context of transformation at the level of the individual and vice versa”
(Niestroj 1989, 141).

Theoretical Assumptions
As we have shown, in sociological conceptions biography is understood not as some­
thing purely individual or subjective, but as a social construct. It refers to collective
rules, discourses and conditions of a social, collective context, and both in its develop­
ment and in the interpretive reflections of the autobiographer, it is always at the same
time both an individual and a social, collective product. In addition to the attempt to
do justice to these so-called ‘interrelationships’ on the basis of the biographies and
life stories of individuals, a biographical approach has two other objectives. The first
is to interpret the meaning of experiences and activities not in isolation but in the
overall context of the life story, and the other is to reconstruct and analyze the histor­
ical process of the genesis, maintenance and change of collective, social phenomena
in the context of life courses.
Practitioners of interpretative biographical research use biographical methods for
questions that obviously relate to the life stories of people; but in addition, questions
relating to other topics may also be formulated in biographical form. The methodolog­
ical decision to ask for the whole life story to be told, regardless of the specific research
question, is based on fundamental theoretical assumptions (Rosenthal 2004). When
we are dealing with questions of social science or history relating to social phenomena
that are tied to people’s experiences and have biographical meaning for them, these
assumptions lead us to interpret the meaning of these phenomena within the context
of their biographies.
These assumptions are:
1. In order to understand and explain social and psychological phenomena we have
to reconstruct their genesis – the process of their creation, reproduction, and
transformation.
2. In order to understand and explain people’s actions and activities it is necessary
to find out about both the subjective perspectives of the actors and their long-time
courses of action. We want to find out what they experienced, what meaning they
gave their actions at the time, what meaning they assign to them today, and in
which biographically constituted contexts they embed their experiences.
 1.20 Sociology 187

3. In order to be able to understand and explain the statements of an interviewee

or autobiographer about particular topics and experiences in his or her past, it is
necessary to interpret these statements as an integral part of the overall context of
the person’s present life and the resulting present and future perspectives.

In biographical studies the researcher looks at the experiences preceding and follow­
ing the phenomenon in question, and the diachronic order in which they occurred.
The point is to reconstruct social phenomena in their process of becoming. This
applies both to processes of creation and reproduction of established structures and
to processes of transformation. When reconstructing a past (the life history) presented
in the present of a life narrative (the life story) it has to be considered that the pres­
entation of past events is constituted by the present of narration. The present of the
autobiographer determines the perspective from which the past is seen and produces
a specific past. His or her present perspective conditions the selection of memories,
the temporal and thematic linkage of memories, and the type of representation of the
remembered experiences. This means that in the course of a life, with its biographical
turning points that lead to reinterpretations of the past and present, and also of the
future, new remembered pasts arise at each point (Fischer 1982). This construction of
the past out of the present is not, however, to be understood as a construction that is
separate from the experienced past. Instead, memory-based narratives of experienced
events are also constituted through experiences in the past (Rosenthal 2006; 2016).
Thus narratives of experienced events are shaped both by the present life and the
past experience. Just as the past is constituted out of the present and the anticipated
future, so the present arises out of the past and the possible or imagined futures. In
this way biographical narratives provide information about the narrator’s present, as
well as about his or her past and his or her images of the future.

Objectives
Biographical research in sociology has several goals. On the one hand, it is concerned
with the analysis of experiences within specific spheres or phases of the life of particu­
lar group(ing)s of people in particular historical periods and particular places (like the
classical study by Thomas and Znaniecki on Polish immigrants in the USA, or studies
of particular youth scenes). On the other hand, it is concerned with the reconstruction
of social settings from the perspective of the actors in specific historical periods and
socio-cultural contexts (e. g. a milieu study of a socially deprived area in a big city).
Another aim is the analysis of biographical self-thematization and thematization by
others in social interactions, both in private contexts (e. g. with family members or
friends) and in formal or institutionalized contexts (e. g. in court, in job interviews,
at the doctor’s, in church-related settings, or in contexts of conflict management). An
188 1 Theoretical Approaches

important issue for current biographical research in sociology is to connect the anal­
ysis of biographical constructions and biographical self-presentation in the present
(for instance, what are the rules for biographical self-thematization by survivors of
collective violence in Bosnia or by former psychiatric patients?) with a reconstruction
of the genesis and transformation of these constructions. Researchers also examine
to what extent biographical thematizations in certain settings in the past (such as
asylum procedures or psychiatric interviews) have a sustained influence on construc­
tions in the present and in other social contexts and situations.

Methods
The goals of biographical research and the theoretical assumptions discussed above
imply particular requirements for data collection and methods of data analysis. Unlike
other qualitative methods, the intention is to reveal not only the patterns of interpre­
tation of the interviewees in the present of the interview, but also to obtain an insight
into the genesis of these interpretations, their interconnectedness with the lived life
and with the sequential ‘Gestalt’ [figure/form] of the life history. The methods enable
the researcher to attain proximity to the courses of action and the experiences of the
autobiographer, not only to his or her present interpretations, and to reconstruct the
differences between the present perspectives and the perspectives that have been
adopted in the past.
The biographical narrative interview (Schütze 2005; Rosenthal 2003), in which
the interviewees are asked to tell their life story, meets these requirements particu­
larly well. For the text analysis of biographical interviews proposed by Schütze
(2007; Riemann 2006), the differentiation of text sorts (narration, argumentation and
description), an analysis of their function, and a reconstruction of the overall bio­
graphical structuring of the life history are important. In the approach presented by
the author (Rosenthal 1995, 2004), it is crucial to investigate the two levels of narrated
and experienced life history in separate analytical steps. This means that the objective
of reconstruction covers both the biographical meaning and potency of the past expe­
rience and the meaning of the self-presentation in the present. In this method of bio­
graphical case reconstruction, sequential analysis represents a procedure for analyz­
ing the temporal structure of both the narrated and the experienced life history. On the
basis of the given text, the researcher tries to reconstruct the sequential ‘Gestalt’ of the
life story presented in the interview, and in a subsequent, separate step the sequential
‘Gestalt’ of the experienced life history is also analyzed. These two steps then con­
tribute to discovering the genetic connectedness and interrelationship between both.

Translation: Ruth Schubert

 1.20 Sociology 189

Works Cited
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tive in the Field of Migration Studies.” Research Integration: Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universi-
tät, University of York. https://www.york.ac.uk/res/researchintegration/Integrative_Research_
Methods/Apitzsch%20Biographical%20Analysis%20April%202007.pdf (20 August 2018).
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday,
1966.
Bertaux, Daniel, ed. Biography and Society. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981.
Bertaux, Daniel, and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame. “Heritage and its Lineage: A Case History of Transmis-
sion and Social Mobility Over Five Generations.” Pathways to social class. Ed. Daniel Bertaux
and Paul Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 63– 97.
Bertaux, Daniel, and Catherine Delcroix. “Case Histories of Families and Social Processes: Enriching
Sociology.” The Turn of Biographical Methods in Social Science. Eds. Prue Camberlayne, Joan
Bornat, and Tom Wengraf. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. 71–89.
Bertaux, Daniel, and Martin Kohli. “The Life Story Approach: A Continental View.” Annual Review of
Sociology 10 (1984): 215–237.
Bertaux, Daniel, and Paul Thompson. “Introduction.” Pathways to social class. Eds. Daniel Bertaux
and Paul Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 1–31.
Bogner, Artur, and Gabriele Rosenthal, eds. Biographies in the Global South. Frankfurt a.M./New
York: Campus, 2017.
Bohler, Karl Friedrich, and Bruno Hildenbrand. “Conditions for Sociological Research in Biography.”
International Sociology 10.3 (1995): 331–340.
Breckner, Roswitha. “Case-Oriented Comparative Approaches. The Biographical Perspective as
Potential and Challenge in Migration Research.” In: Concepts and Methods in Migration
Research. Conference Reader. Ed. Karin Schittenhelm. 113–152. (2007). https://www.academia.
edu/2528100/Case-oriented_comparative_approaches_the_biographical_perspective_as_
opportunity_and_challenge_in_migration_research (20 August 2018).
Elias, Norbert. Die Gesellschaft der Individuen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987 [The Society of Indi-
viduals. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991].
Fischer, Wolfram. Time and Chronic Illness. A Study on Social Constitution of Temporality. Habil.
Thesis U Berkeley, 1982.
Fischer, Wolfram, and Martin Kohli. “Biographieforschung.” Methoden der Biographie- und Lebens­
laufforschung. Ed. Wolfgang Voges. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1987. 25–50.
Kohli, Martin. “Biographical Research in the German Language Area.” A Commemorative Book
in Honor of Florian Znaniecki on the Centenary of his Birth. Ed. Zygmunt Dulcewski. Poznan:
­Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1986. 91–110.
Kruse, Volker. “Von der historischen Nationalökonomie zur historischen Soziologie.” Zeitschrift für
Soziologie 19.3 (1990): 149–165.
Niestroj, Brigitte. “Norbert Elias: A Milestone in Historical Psycho-sociology: The Making of the
Social Person.” Journal of Historical Sociology 2.2 (1989): 136–169.
Riemann, Gerhard. “An Introduction to ‘Doing Biographical Research’.” Historical Social Research
31.3 (2006): 6–28.
Rosenthal, Gabriele. Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte. Gestalt und Struktur biographischer
Selbstbeschreibungen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1995.
Rosenthal, Gabriele, ed. “Special Issue: Family History – Life Story.” History of the Family: An Inter-
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Rosenthal, Gabriele. “Biographical Research.” Qualitative Research Practice. Ed. Clive Seale, Giam-
petro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman. London: Sage, 2004. 48–64.
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Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Narrated Life Story: On The Interrelation Between Experience, Memory
and Narration.” Narrative, Memory and Knowledge: Representations, Aesthetics and Contexts.
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field: University of Huddersfield Press, 2006. 1–16.
Rosenthal, Gabriele, ed. The Holocaust in Three Generations. Families of Victims and Perpetrators of
the Nazi Regime. 2nd revised edition. Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2010.
Rosenthal, Gabriele. “A Plea for a More Interpretive, More Empirical and More Historical Sociology”.
The Shape of Sociology for the Twenty-First Century: Tradition and Renewal. Ed. Devorah
Kalekin-Fishman and Ann B. Denis. London: Sage, 2012. 202–217.
Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Social Construction of Individual and Collective Memory.” In: Theorizing
Social Memories. Concepts, Temporality, Functions. Ed. Gerd Sebald and Jatin Wagle. London:
Routledge, (2016): 32–55.
Rossi, Pietro. Vom Historismus zur historischen Sozialwissenschaft: Heidelberger Max Weber-Vor-
lesungen 1985. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987.
Schütz, Alfred. “Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action.” Collected Papers.
Vol. I. The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962. 3–47.
Schütze, Fritz. “Cognitive Figures of Autobiographical Extempore Narration.” Biographical Research
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Schütze, Fritz. “Biography Analysis on the Empirical Base of Autobiographical Narratives:
How to Analyse Autobiographical Narrative Interviews—part II. Module B.2.2. INVITE—Biograph-
ical Counselling in Rehabilitative Vocational Training—Further Education Curriculum.”
http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/zsm/projekt/biographical/1/B2.2.pdf. (14 June 2018).
Shaw, Clifford R. The Jack-Roller. A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1930.
Siouti, Irini. “Biography as a Theoretical and Methodological Key Concept in Transnational Migra-
tion Studies.” In: The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History. Ed. Ivor
Goodson Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes, and Molly Andrews. 179–189. London: Routledge. 2016.
Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 2 vols. New
York: Dover, 2nd ed. 1958.
Weber, Max. Sociological writing. Ed. Wolf Heydebrand. London: Continuum, 1994.

Further Reading
Champerlayne, Prue, Johanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf. The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social
Science. London: Routledge, 2000.
Miller, Robert Lee, ed. Biographical Research Methods. 4 vols. London: Sage, 2005.
Rosenthal, Gabriele. “Biographical Research.” Qualitative Research Practice. Ed. Clive Seale, Giam-
petro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman. London: Sage, 2004. 48–64.
1.21 Structuralism
Erik Martin

Structuralism was, inter alia, a harsh critique of the classical humanistic concept of
the subject. This criticism was directed pre-eminently against the idea of an autono­
mous ‘I’, which has, by immediate self-presence or self-evidence, a privileged knowl­
edge of its own identity. In contrast, structuralism assumes that all knowledge is
ineluctably bound to language defined as a decentralized system with no ‘private’
epistemic access whatsoever. Moreover, structuralism proposes that the subject is
rather an effect of language, than its transcendent creator. This was a serious chal­
lenge because autobiography, at least from the hermeneutic point of view, was not
only a literary genre defined by concepts like authenticity, authority, and facticity,
i. e. paradigmatic forms of truthful testimony and genuine self-expression, but a place
of sovereign knowledge about oneself as well as history and society. Georg Misch,
claimed that there is “nothing truer or more revealing than the inner form [of autobi­
ography]” (Misch 1998, 11) for this “inner form” also reflects the basic relation between
the I and the world. Even though the subjectivist approach to autobiography brought
along substantial methodological difficulties such as the problem of fictionalization
of life ensuing from a deliberate selection of facts by the writer of an autobiography
or the problem of scientific and objective value of “inner form”, those problems were
considered as basic problems of hermeneutics in general and its proponents were not
willing to sacrifice an essentialist concept of subjectivity to solve them. This radical
step was to be done by the structuralists.
Structuralism originated from structural linguistics which begins with the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure. His groundbreaking ideas on the structure of language were
summarized by his pupils, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in the epochal Cours
de linguistique générale (1916) [Course in General Linguistics (1959)] which was pub­
lished after de Saussure’s death. The book provided the foundation for both modern
linguistics and semiotics and was proven to be highly influential not only on academic
linguistics but also on philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
Many concepts in the Course in General Linguistics are based on binary oppo­
sitions. First of all, Saussure differentiates within the human speech (‘langage’)
between ‘langue’, as a system of abstract rules and conventions that is independ­
ent of and logically pre-exists individual users, and ‘parole’ as the individual acts of
speech. Although language does not exist independently from concrete utterances, de
Saussure claims that while human speech is heterogeneous and thus can be subject
of various sciences, it is ‘langue’ that is which is homogeneous and therefore the prior
object for linguistics (de Saussure 1959, 15). Inside the ‘langue’, the basic notion for
de Saussure is the linguistic sign, which consists of a(n) (abstract) sound image (sig­
nifier/‘signifiant’) and a mental concept (signified/‘signifié’). Although the relation
between signifier and signified is arbitrary or unmotivated, both elements form an

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-022
192 1 Theoretical Approaches

inseparable psychological entity (1959, 66). Since de Saussure supposes that there are
no pre-existing ideas and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language, a sign
cannot be positively determined by its mental ‘content’, that is by signification (1959,
112). Rather each sign is defined through its linguistic value i. e. through its negative
relation to other signs. De Saussure uses the example of the French word ‘mouton’ and
the English word ‘sheep’: Even though both words might have the same signification,
they have different values because in speaking of a piece of meat on the table, English
uses ‘mutton’ and not ‘sheep’ (1959, 115–116). Language thus works through systematic
relations of difference which place signs in logical opposition to one another.
This system of linguistic values completely determines a given state of language.
But as the linguistic sign is arbitrary, language is permanently subjected to small
changes and therefore can be studied as a synchronic as well as a diachronic phenom­
enon. However, de Saussure prefers the synchronic access because the synchronic
laws apply generally, whereas diachronic facts can be accidental and particular (1959,
91–92).
These concepts implied interesting alternatives to contemporary intellectual
schools of thought. First of all, de Saussure’s ideas were clearly opposed to any kind
of intuitivist or individualistic tendencies in philosophy, psychology, and other dis­
ciplines because mental phenomena were taken into account only as inextricably
bound to linguistic facts, thus not being considered autonomous. Furthermore, de
Saussure’s emphasis on the systemic character of the linguistic signs, as well as the
plain preference of ‘langue’ over the individual speech act, explicitly precludes any
notions of ‘expression’ of extralinguistic feelings or thought. But de Saussure also
opposed the late nineteenth century positivism. For example he tried to overcome
the so-called Neogrammarian School, which on the one hand restricted its research
only to directly observable phenomena such as the sound level of language (ignor­
ing hereby it’s semiotic aspect) and on the other hand tried to deliver a complete
description of the historical change of language governed by laws whose rigidity was
supposed to be analogue to causal laws in natural science. De Saussure’s model of
language as abstract a-temporal structure ecaped historicism as well as reductionism
providing nevertheless linguistic laws sui generis accurate enough to maintain a sci­
entific standard.
De Saussure’s ideas became very soon popular in Russia, a fact which might be
explained by the work and influence of the Russian-Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de
Courtenay, who might be considered as a precursor of structural linguistic (Jakob­
son 1972). However, long before the Russian translation of the Cours was completed
in 1933, structuralist ideas were discussed in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the
OPOJAZ (OПOЯЗ) (Russian: Общество изучения Поэтического Языка, Obščestvo
izučenija POėtičeskogo JAZyka, ‘Society for the Study of Poetic Language’) in St.
Petersburg. These groups united well-known linguists, philosophers, ethnographers,
and artist like Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
and many others. Both groups were responsible for the development of Russian for­
 1.21 Structuralism 193

malism (prominently linked with the names Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and
Yurij Tynianov, and sometimes used synonymously with OPOJaZ) as well as literary
semiotics.
Although structuralism and formalism were, of course, distinct intellectual par­
adigms, they had some substantial similarities. One of these similarities was the
eminent importance of differential qualities. For example: In a short reflection on
the concept of realism in 1921, Roman Jakobson repudiates the attempts to define
realism through verisimilitude, for everything in art is conventional. However, there
is a “revoljucionnyj realizm” [“revolutionary realism”] (Jakobson 1987, 89 [1971, 40])
which proposes new criteria of representation by deformation of the established
canonical aesthetic rules, thus becoming ‘more real’ to the innovators (Jakobson
1971, 44). The notion of ‘deformation’ refers to the key-idea of formalist aesthetics
and poetics – Viktor Shklovsky’s term ‘ostranenie’ which means ‘defamiliarization’ or
‘estrangement’. ‘Ostranenie’ provides a differential quality between poetic language
and everyday language; because the former is more difficult to understand (for it
describes familiar objects in strange terms), it forces us to pay attention to its percep­
tibility, which Shklovsky considers to be an aesthetic value per se (Shklovsky 1990).
As a second common ground, one can refer to the attempt of overcoming the dualism
of form and content. As in Saussurean theory of signs, where the sound image is not a
form that ‘carries’ the mental concept as its content, Formalists fought the traditional
opinion that the form of a literary work is a mere ‘ornatus’ [‘decoration’], an addition
to what ‘the author tries to convey’. Rather the form was thought to be the content
of literature, which means that a piece of art first of all draws attention to its ‘being
made’, its texture (Hansen-Löve 1985). The third resemblance between formalism and
structuralism is the rejection of historicism. In an essay from 1927, Tynianov tried to
replace literary genesis, understood as a historical succession of ‘great’ writers and
their influence on the following generation, through systemic evolution, which shall
study the shifts of literary functions in different genres and epochs (Tynianov 1971).
Moreover, along with Heinrich Wölfflin, the Formalists wanted to write a “history
of art without names” (1917, VII) in the sense that not singular artists but literature
itself (its technique and devices) has to become an agent of its own development. It is
unnecessary to stress, that formalists also repudiated psychological or biographical
explanations of literature.
Despite this bias against the author as a (psychological, social, historical)
persona, it is quite remarkable that the main figures of formalism turned to (auto)biog­
raphy in their works. In the early 1920s Shklovsky wrote three larger autobiographical
texts: Sentimental’noe putešestvie (1923) [A Sentimental Journey (1970)], Zoo. Pis’ma
ne o ljub’vi ili Tret’ja Ėloiza (1923) [Zoo. Letters Not About Love, or The Third Heloise
(1971)], and Tret’ja fabrika (1926) [The Third Factory (1979)]. The Journey is about the
years of revolution and civil war, in which Shklovsky actively participated – in fact,
he was forced to flee Russia for being part of an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Thus the
title alludes to Laurence Sterne, not in respect to the ‘idyllic’ content, but rather to
194 1 Theoretical Approaches

the digressive style Shklovsky so much admired in his theoretical and emulated in
(auto)fictional text. The same game of ironic stylization combined with an intricate
mixture of events from personal life and literary ‘syuzhets’ [‘storys’] can be found in
Zoo. The motivation behind the text is Shklovsky’s unrequited passion for Elsa Triolet,
the future wife of Louis Aragon (hence the subtitle of the text, for Elsa is the third
Heloise after Abelard’s and Rousseau’s). The letters, however, are not about love, but
rather an intimate reflexion on his exiled situation in Berlin alternating with general
thoughts on theory of literature thus defamiliarizing the genre of an epistolary novel.
The last letter deconstructs this genre completely, for it is addressed not to Elsa Triolet
but to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee with a plea for the permission to
return to Russia. The Third Factory is perhaps the most autoreferential of these texts,
for it explicitly lays bare the devices of constructing one’s life as a literary fact.
(Auto)biography also plays a certain role for Boris Eikhenbaum. Alongside with
‘typical’ formalist writings in the 1920s he works on a biography of Tolstoy which
gained a tremendous extent and was published between the years 1922 and 1940 in
several volumes. In 1929 Eikhenbaum publishes Moj vremennik [My chonicle], a pecu­
liar mix of heterogenic genres such as autobiography, diary, memoires, family chroni­
cle, as well as theoretical reflection on literature and history (Levčenko 2012).
The work of Jurij Tynianov is also situated in the liminal space between scientific
biography and historical fiction. One of his two major novels deals with a rather off­
shoot figure of Russian literature – the romantic poet and critic Wilhelm Küchelbecker
(Tynianov 1925). The other is about the last years of the famous poet and a friend of
Pushkin – Alexander Griboedov (Tynianov 1929). In these texts Tynianov intricately
interweaves fact and fiction thus creating an indissoluble tension of illusiveness – a
technique brought to more perfection in the historical novel Voskovaja persona (1931)
[Wax Figure] (Bljumbaum 2002).
For a long time among scholars the formalists’ retreat into autobiographical or
fictional genres was regarded as a kind of Biedermeier, a consequence of the repres­
sions under the communistic regime in the late 1920s. Nowadays, this shift is likely
considered to be due to an autonomous dialectic of the formalist’s inner development
(Levčenko 2012). Moreover, the fusion of the roles of a critic, ‘litterateur’, and theorist
in a single persona, as well as certain displacements of postulated theoretical con­
cepts in one’s own fiction, instantly brings to mind analogue techniques used by post­
modern writers such as Susan Sontag, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cicioux,
Umberto Eco, and others. According to this fact, more recent publications try to regard
formalism as rather connected with deconstruction than structuralism (Steiner 1984;
Kujundzic 1997; Speck 1997).
Nevertheless, the intellectual climate in the USSR forced various thinkers into
emigration, which, regardless of personal hardship, helped the spreading of struc­
turalist ideas. It were the two émigrés, Roman Jakobson and Nikolay Trubezkoy, who
besides Vilém Mathesius, Bohuslav Havránek, and later Jan Mukařovský, were the
leading members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Though in some respects quite dif­
 1.21 Structuralism 195

ferent from de Saussure’s original concepts (Holenstein 1975; Seriot 1999), it proved
to play an important role in the development of structuralism. Along with the Copen­
hagen School around Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal and the adherents of de
Saussure in Geneva, it was one of the three major centres of structuralism in Europe
in the 1920s to1930s.
As the political situation dramatically changed for the worst in the late 1930s,
the intellectual centre of structuralism moved further to the west. In 1941 Jakobson
managed to escape from Europe to New York where he met Claude Lévi-Strauss at the
École Libre des Hautes Études. It is common belief that Jakobson’s ideas helped Lévi-
Strauss to design a theoretical framework for the Structural Anthropology, a method
he prominently employed in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) [The Ele-
mentary Structures of Kinship (1969)]. It seems also most likely that Jakobson informed
Lévi-Strauss that Vladimir Propp had applied structuralist methods to ethnography
already in 1929, namely in his book Morfologija skazki [Morphology of the Folktale
(1958)], where he claimed that the (Russian) fairy tale could be described exhaustively
as a syntagmatic sequence of 31 narrative functions (Grazzini 1999). However, it was
the works of Lévi-Strauss that revived the interest in structuralism in post-war France
and made it a major intellectual movement among humanities. Jacques Lacan, for
example, makes in “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage” (1953) [“The Func­
tion and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (2006)] explicit reference
to Lévi-Strauss’s notion of a structural relation between language and society as he
establishes his own concept of an analogy between the unconscious and language.
Beside his scientific texts, Lévi-Strauss was also famous as the author of Triste
Tropiques (1955) [A World on the Wane (1961)]. As it mostly deals with his anthropo­
logical fieldwork in Brazil, one would tend to classify it as travel literature. However,
Susan Sontag called it an “intellectual autobiography, an exemplary personal history”
(1966, 72) and Clifford Geertz has even regarded it as an “arch-text” (1988, 32) of all
Lévi-Strauss’s writings. He draws attention to the question of this text’s genre, for it
seems to be a “superimposing of different sorts of text, bringing an overall pattern
[of] mutually interfering texts existing at the same level” (Geertz 1988, 33). It is also
remarkable for its high level of self-reflexivity, which is already marked in its title, as
“tropiques” obviously also alludes to ‘trope’. Furthermore, it explicitly reflects on the
power of knowledge as a power of writing (in the prominent chapter “La leçon d’écrit­
ure” [“A Writing Lesson”]). But whereas Sontag seems to detect in Triste Tropiques “an
immense but thoroughly subdued pathos” (1966, 80) which she even tries to invoke
with the trope of romantic alienation and melancholy (the former title of her review –
“A Hero of our Time” – refers to the homonymous work of the Russian post-romantic
Michail Lermontov), Geertz stresses its total factious and self-reflecting character and
even claims that it is written in the style of an “ideal-typical Russian/Czech formalist
poem” (1988, 33).
It seems to be characteristic that the interest on self-reflexivity becomes more and
more eminent as it might indicate a transition from structuralism to poststructural­
196 1 Theoretical Approaches

ism. While structuralism was focused on the systematic oppositions that gave any
utterance its meaning, deconstruction takes into account the self-context of enunci­
ation. However, for various theoreticians this transition was simply a modification of
aspects and was not always clearly seen as a paradigm shift. Moreover, as structural­
ism became a leading intellectual movement in the 1960s, many theorists, who found
themselves labelled this way, cannot not be unequivocally assigned to structuralism
for they tried to overcome some of the structuralism’s basic tenets (but still use some of
its elements or assumptions). Such authors with highly controversial affiliation with
structuralism were for example Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, or Roland Barthes.
In his autobiography, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes (1977)] the French semiologist abandons the traditional chronological
order of life narrative and, instead, composes his text of shorter paragraphs. As they
are presented in an alphabetical order, these paragraphs indicate the basic textuality
of the autobiographical ego. And, in order not to establish the alphabet as an authori­
tative pattern of representation, Barthes deliberately abandons the alphabetical order
twice. This sort of play with the autobiographical form may be regarded as an effect of
the structuralist awareness of linguistic and cultural patterns.
As structuralism approached its point of crises, Philip Lejeune published his
works on autobiography, which can on the overall account still be called structural­
ist. Lejeune defines autobiography as a “[r]écit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne
réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en
particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [“retrospective prose narrative written
by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life,
in particular the story of his personality”] (Lejeune 1975, 14 [1989, 4]). In order to be
a substantial instrument for literary analysis, this definition has to at least be able to
differentiate autobiography from adjacent genres. As Lejeune subsequently shows,
this distinction works out in most cases like memoire, biography, diary, essay etc.
However, there occur difficulties as the definition is applied to a personal novel,
for there seems to be no formal indication possible in the text which helps us to
decide whether it is fictional or not, as long as one does not take refuge in extra-tex­
tual entities like the author’s “special unity and identity across time” (Gusdorf
1980, 35).
Lejeune’s solution is rather on the technical than the ontological level. In certain
respect following Foucault’s conception of different functions of the author’s name in
“Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969) [“What is an Author?”] Lejeune states that “l’autobi­
ographie (…) suppose qu’il y ait identité de nom entre l’auteur (tel qu’il figure, par son
nom, sur la couverture), le narrateur du récit et le personnage dont on parle” [“auto­
biography […] supposes that there is identity of name between the author (such as he
figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is
being talking about”] (Lejeune 1975, 23–24 [1989, 12]). Since Lejeune operates from the
point of view of the reader-response criticism, the supposed identity of narrator and
author, of course, can never be proven right (or wrong) – it is simply a mode of ‘agree­
 1.21 Structuralism 197

ment’ between the text and the reader that is precisely a contract, an autobiographical
(or a fictional) pact stating the identity (resp. the non-identity) of the author.
Lejeune’s proposal for a generic definition of autobiography provoked fundamen­
tal criticism, for, according to Paul de Man, “any book with a readable title-page is, to
some extent, autobiographical” (de Man 1979, 922). De Man argues, that what Lejeune
has mistaken for the author’s name is, in fact, the rhetorical figure of ‘prosopopoeia’,
“the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity” (1979, 926).
This, however, is the basic trope of autobiography “by which one’s name […] is made
as intelligible and memorable as a face” (1979, 926; emphasis mine). Because the
author’s name is just a trope among others, the distinction between fact and fiction
is no longer a sensible operation. But as far as the trope of ‘prosopopoeia’ not only
conceals this distinction but also “reveals the tropological structure that underlies
all cognition, including knowledge of the self”, autobiography becomes a privileged
place, for “it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totali­
zation of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (de Man 1979, 922).
Notwithstanding, de Man repudiates the essentialist possibility of defining auto­
biography as a genre, opening thereby a viable option for a formal analysis with struc­
turalist methods. As Stefan Goldmann has shown, certain ‘topoi’, originating from the
classical tradition of the rhetorical ‘persona’ description, such as descent and parent­
age, diseases, first reading experience, etc., may be regarded as invariant patterns
of autobiographical self-representation. Furthermore, he observes that in many auto­
biographies of the European tradition the myth of Heracles provides a cultural mirror
for the ‘individual’ autobiographical ego (Goldmann 1993).

Works Cited
Bljumbaum, Arkadij. Konstrukcija mnimosti. St. Petersburg: Giperion, 2002.
Ėjchenbaum, Boris. Moj vremennik. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelej, 1929.
Geertz, Clifford. “The world in a text. How to read Tristes Tropiques.” Works and lives: The anthropol-
ogist as author. Ed. Clifford Geertz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 25–48.
Goldmann, Stefan. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland im Goethekreis. Eine psychoanalytische Studie zur
Autobiographie und ihrer Topik. Stuttgart: M&P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1993.
Grazzini, Serena. Der strukturalistische Zirkel. Theorien über Mythos und Märchen bei Propp, Lévi-
Strauss, Meletinskij. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1999.
Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and limits of autobiography.” Autobiography. Essays theoretical and
critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48.
Hansen-Löve, Aage. “Faktur, Gemachtheit.” Glossarium der russischen Avantgarde. Ed. Aleksandar
Flaker. Graz: Droschl, 1985. 212–219.
Holenstein, Elmar. Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer Strukturalismus. Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1975.
Jakobson, Roman. “O chudožestvennom realizme.” Raboty po poėtike. Ed. M. L. Gasparova. Moscow:
Progress, 1987. 387–393 [“On Realism in Art.” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and
Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
38–46].
198 1 Theoretical Approaches

Jakobson, Roman. “The Kazan School of Polish Linguistics and its Place in the International Devel­
opment of Phonology.” Selected Writings. Word and Language. Vol. II. Ed. Roman Jakobson.
The Hague: Mouton, 1972. 394–429.
Kujundžić, Dragan. The returns of history. Russian Nietzscheans after modernity. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997.
Lacan, Jacques. “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage.” La psychanalyse 1 (1956): 81–166
[“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Écrits. The First Com-
plete Edition in English. Ed. Jaques Lacan. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
197–268].
Lejeune, Philip. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed.
Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].
Levčenko, Jan. Drugaja nauka. Russkie formalisty v poiskach biografii. Moscow: Dom Vysšej Školy
Ėkonomiki, 2012.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955 [A world on the wane. Trans. John Russell.
New York: Criterion Books, 1961].
de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–930.
Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I. Frankfurt a. M.: Schulte Blumke,
1949 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part 1. Trans. Karl Mannheim. London: Routledge,
1998].
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne: Payot, 1916 [Course in General
Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophi-
cal Library, 1959].
Seriot, Patrick. Structure et totalité: les origines intellctuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et
orientale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
[Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. Sentimental’noe putešestvie. Moscow, Berlin: Gelikon, 1923 [A Senti-
mental Journey. Memoirs, 1917–1922. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1970].
[Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. Zoo. Pis’ma ne o ljubvi ili Tret’ja Ėloiza. Moscow, Berlin: Gelikon, 1923
[Zoo, or Letters not about love. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971].
[Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. Tret’ja fabrika. Moscow: Artel’ pisatelej, 1926 [Third Factory. Trans.
Richard Sheldon. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979].
[Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. “Iskusstvo kak priem.” Sborniki po teorii poetičeskogo jazyka. Vol. II.
St. Petersburg: Opojaz, 1917. 3–14 [“Art as Device.” Theory of Prose. Ed. Victor Shklovsky. Trans.
Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. 1–15].
Sontag, Susan. “The anthropologist as hero.” Against interpretation. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. 69–82.
Speck, Stefan. Von Šklovskij zu de Man: zur Aktualität formalistischer Literaturtheorie. München:
Fink, 1997.
Steiner, Peter. Russian formalism: a metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Tynjanov, Jurij. Kjuchlja. Leningrad: Kubuč, 1925.
Tynjanov, Jurij. Smert’ Vazir-Muchtara. Leningrad: Priboj, 1929.
Tynjanov, Jurij. “Voskovaja persona.” Zvezda 1.2 (1931). N.pag.
Tynjanov, Jurij. “O literaturnoj ėvoljucii.” Poėtika. Istorija literatury. Kino. Ed. Yuri Tynianov. Moscow:
Nauka, 1977. 270–281 [“On Literary Evolution.” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and
Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
66–78].
Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. München: Hugo Bruckmann Verlag, 1917.
 1.21 Structuralism 199

Further Reading
Blanchard, Marc Eli. “Of Cannibalism and Autobiography.” Modern Language Notes 93 (1978):
654–676.
Blanchard, Marc Eli. “The Critique of Autobiography.” Comparative Literature 34 (1982): 97–115.
Hansen-Löve, Aage. Der russische Formalismus: methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner
­Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissen-
schaften, 1978.
Mehlman, Jeffrey. A structural study of autobiography: Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1974.
Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: essays theoretical and critical. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980.
Olney, James. Metaphors of self: the meaning of autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1972.
Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1960.
1.22 Theology
Thomas K. Kuhn

Autobiography research that is international and interdisciplinary has boomed con­

siderably in recent decades and is flanked by instructive theoretical debates. If in
1988 the historian Andreas Gestrich could still describe as ‘desolate’ the situation
of scholarly historical biography (Gestrich 1988, 5), to which the concern with per­
sonal biographical testimonies also belongs, a new and broad interest in research
on life stories has emerged. The same cannot be said however – and in contrast to
the lively Anglophone scholarship (see in particular the work by John D. Barbour) –
for German-language theology. The assessment by Lothar Kuld in 1997 that theolog­
ical autobiography research is still very much in the beginning still holds for today
(Kuld 1997, 11), even if it has noticeably grown since the 1980s in practical theology
especially – above all in the context of research on (religious) curriculum vitae and
pastoral care. Autobiographical research in the discipline of theology is divided into
a methodologically under-reflective church history that hardly participates in expand­
ing theory discussions (Nowak 1994, 45) and a much more interdisciplinary-ori­
ented approach rooted in practical theology. Both research perspectives frequently
procede without an awareness of one another; common to both are, alongside the
interest in gender studies, questions concerning religious praxis in social and indi­
vidual life contexts, the life-informing effects of theological and religious orienta­
tions, as well as the shape and function of biographies in the context of death and
dying.
Within the Christian tradition, polymorphic biographical literature commands a
qualitatively significant position. The study of these particular sources in theology
is by no means self-evident, but entails specific theological requirements. Although
biographical interest appears as a characteristic of the modern history of Christianity
stemming from the Pietist heritage (Drehsen 1990, 33), the dominance of dialectical
theology in the twentieth century for a long time prevented a theological concern for
biographical texts. This theology derived from God did not ascribe any essential theo­
logical relevance to life stories: For if God is the entirely other, life stories do not play a
role; faith does not aim for self-mirroring, but expects the call from ‘outside’. Without
a doubt, the arguments made by Karl Barth and others carry theological weight, but
they do not answer the question of how to think the relationship between biography
and religion. Only the insight into the existentiality of belief, as advocated for instance
by Rudolf Bultmann, as well as the emphasis on the contextuality of theology and reli­
gion in the lifeworld encouraged the theological confrontation with (auto)biography.
Hence, this interest is an expression of a certain theory of religion that, on the one
hand, emphasizes the close interaction between biography and theology and thus
understands theology as an expression of an individual life story. On the other hand,
this theory treats human life stories as theologically relevant texts. Autobiographies in

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-023
 1.22 Theology 201

this case are treated as theology experienced by one’s self (Hirzel 1998, 211), and can
therefore display kerygmatic intentions.
More recently, Henning Luther has presented further observations. He conceives
theology on the one hand as a “konkrete, fleischgewordene, die Existenz jedes ein­
zelnen lebenspraktisch betreffende, ansprechende und herausfordernde Wahrheit”
[‘concrete truth rendered in the flesh, which affects, addresses, and challenges the
existence of every single individual in his life-praxis’] possessing significant impor­
tance for individual life (Luther 1992, 38). He underscores on the other hand that reli­
gion is constitutively related to the question of the possibility of becoming a subject
and that the irreducibility of the individuality of the individual is the ultimate point
of reference of Christian religion (Luther 1992, 30). For him, the preoccupation with
representations of life stories is theologically relevant for three reasons. With regard
to the sociology of religion and church, he cites first the individualization of lifestyle
and religious existence: life-stories narrate individualized forms of belief and reli­
gion. On the level of a pedagogy of religion, secondly, biographical narratives do not
have an exemplary function when it comes to the norming of behavior and belief, but
instead encourage open religious self-reflection. Finally, the concern with life stories
is grounded theologically in the reference to the importance of the human being
before God: Individual human life is sacred before God and is not indifferent (Luther
1992, 38–44).
These premises give rise to several innovative research perspectives. First, the
theological reflection raises the question concerning the relevant autobiographical
texts. Yet, at the same time, it becomes clear that definitions of the genre of autobi­
ography are incomplete (Kuld 1997, 26). Second, explicitly religious autobiographies
move into the focus of attention. Characteristic for them are the relations between
the self, the world, and God that are defined individually and in this way combine an
individual path of life with an understanding of God, world and self (Benrath 1979,
773). In them, as well as in other, ‘profane’ autobiographies – for instance, in that of
the singer Nina Hagen, who published Bekenntnisse [‘Confessions’] (Hagen 2010) –
we can find religiously confessional statements and stories of conversion. Under a
reversed sign – critical of religion – expressly modern autobiographies offer similar
reports, such as that of Tilman Moser, who in his book Gottesvergiftung [‘Poisoning by
God’] (1976) describes the emancipation from a religious upbringing as a process of
liberation. Even such autobiographies critical of religion contain high theological rel­
evance (Gräb 1990, 84, cites additional autobiographical examples). Third, in addition
to the aforementioned explicitly religious autobiographies, theological scholarship
is interested in life narratives in a wider sense because the writing of an autobiogra­
phy can be interpreted as a thoroughly religious act or the autobiographical narrative
stance as structurally religious (Kuld 1997, 26; Barbour 1998, 1604).
From a theological and historical point of view, autobiographies can be read as
an “unerschöpflicher Kosmos religiöser Individualitäten” [‘inexhaustible cosmos of
religious individualities’] (Nowak 1994, 51). They provide information about processes
202 1 Theoretical Approaches

of religious socialization, about formative religious influences as well as about the

modes of appearance of individualized piety. Like hardly any other source, they reveal
subjective moments of religiosity (Mitterauer 1988), and with respect to the history of
piety they register processes of religious transformation and the changing relationship
between a tradition of belief and individual experience. They enable new definitions of
the relationship between religion and theology in modern lifeworlds (Sparn 1990). The
new concern for lived religiosity that accompanies autobiography research expands,
moreover, historiographical perspectives and supplements a history of Christianity
that frequently tends to limit itself to the history of institutions or theology.
Resurfacing in these contexts, on the one hand, is the question, discussed con­
troversially elsewhere, concerning the relationship between historiography and theol­
ogy. On the other hand, life stories show that it is not religion that disappears but the
consensus about what constitutes its essence (Nassehi 1996, 53).

The Concept of ‘Autobiography’

The earliest evidence of a concept of ‘autobiography’ in the German-speaking context
is from 1776 and occurs in a letter from Jakob M. R. Lenz to Goethe, in which Lenz
describes the story of the youth of the doctor and devotional writer Johann Heinrich
Jung-Stilling as an ‘autobiography’ (Niggl 2012, 39). Like the genre itself, the identi­
fication of a specifying concept of ‘Christian autobiography’ is subject to historical
change. Theological research on autobiography is also divided about the concept. In
general, it uses a more broadly conceived concept and the semantic determination of
‘Christian autobiography’ is not uniform. The most recent scholarship suggests that
we understand such autobiographies ‘as reconstructions of faith and theologies of
life, which ensure and secure empirical fact in order to thereby make known the expe­
rience of individuated salvation in the history of a life’ (Kuld 1997, 11). They connect
subjectivity and objectivity by combining a historical narrative with the fictive rep­
resentation of the reality of faith and life (Hirzel 1998, 19) and thus document not life
as immediately lived but life interpreted at a specific point of time in a life. Personal
experiences are thereby linked with accepted traditions. Christian autobiographies
do not primarily produce belief; as selective representations, they reflect individual
engagements and thoughts and serve the processes of both the development and for­
mation of identity.
Niggl refers to ‘religious autobiography’ as a special form of the genre and con­
ceptualizes it in general as the story of a self with God who retrospectively tries to lend
this story an interpretation and meaning (Niggl 1993, 1290). In this sense, it does not
turn out to be simply an historical description of past religious experiences, but an
interpreting and referring religious act.