Life writing: History and Key Facts

Life writing is an expansive genre that primarily deals with the purposeful recording of personal memories, experiences, opinions, and emotions for different ends. While what actually constitutes life writing has been up for debate throughout history, it has often been defined through the lens of the history of the autobiography genre as well as the concept of the self as it arises in writing. Framed by these two concepts, life writing as a genre has emerged to include many other subgenres including, but not limited to, the biography, memoir, diary, letter, testimony, and personal essay.

David McCooey highlights the interplay between literary and empirical writing. McCooey emphasizes the distinction between narrative as a literary tool and narrative as a lived experience. By viewing life writing as a practice rather than a discipline, McCooey points out its perpetual preoccupations with several boundaries. These boundaries include the division between the self and others, the limits of remembering and forgetting, etc.

Life writing has functioned as a generic outlet for individuals to assess their personal diverse needs throughout history. In addition, David McCooey argues that the genre of life writing shares a similar quality to history, as both engage in an ongoing discussion that fosters an understanding of their overall significance within the broader scope of literary expression. It has served as a mode for the exploration of identity through critical self-reflection, allowing an individual to consider the internal, external, and temporal forces shaping their complex social identity. Likewise, the supergenre of life writing has permitted an individual to personally decide how they want to present themselves, whether that be to others within their social groups or simply to themselves as a way of imagining their ideal selves. Often accompanying the opportunity presented by life writing to fabricate a different self is the concept of resisting socio-cultural expectations, as the self that is fashioned may rebel against or reinforce societal norms that would otherwise be difficult to do in one's actual lived experience.

Life writing has further persisted in its use as an emotional space for negotiations of various feelings, inner desires, aspirations, and secrets. Individual pieces of life writing have attested to this flexibility and exploration possible within the genre, and such a flexibility has given life writing the role of preserving memory as well; these memories have ranged from keeping family traditions to recollecting one's past experiences as a way to diminish the potential onset or effects of dementia.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Life writing by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.