Leader - On Life-Writing

Life-writing is a generic term used to describe a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings (narratio first existed not as a literary but as a legal term), marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries). The term itself is often traced to Virginia Woolf, who first used it in A Sketch of the Past (1939), in connection with the difficulties and inadequacies of conventional biography, a word which itself literally means life-writing. The two halves of the word derive from medieval Greek: bios, life, and graphia, writing.

Some writers on life-writing distinguish between shorter forms, conceived of as source material, and life-writing proper or extended life narratives or formal biography and autobiography; others distinguish between life-writing that is exemplary or formulaic, often associated with older periods, and the sort that seems or seeks to express more modern qualities: authenticity, sincerity, interiority, individuality. At least since the 1970s, theoreticians and historians of life-writing commonly fuse or meld sub-genres, as in the neologisms auto/biography, biofiction, biografiction, autonarration, and autobiografiction (this last, surprisingly, the most venerable as well as the most ungainly of coinages, having first appeared in print in 1906). The blurring of distinctions may help to account for life-writings growing acceptance as a field of academic study, reflecting a wider distrust of fixed forms, simple or single truths or meanings, narrative transparency, objectivity, literature as opposed to writing.

This volume offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, introducing readers to the range of forms the term encompasses, their changing fortunes and features, the notions of life, self, and story which help to explain these changing fortunes and features, recent attempts to group forms, the permeability of the boundaries between forms, the moral problems raised by life-writing in all forms, but particularly in fictional forms, and the relations between life-writing and history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. The chapters mostly select individual instances rather than survey historical, theoretical, or generic fields; generalizations are grounded in particulars. For example, the role of the life-changing encounter, a frequent trope in literary life-writing, is considered by Hermione Lee through a handful of examples, notably a much-storied meeting between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; James Shapiro examines the history of the cradle to grave life-narrative, as well as the potential distortions it breeds, by using the example of Shakespeare biography, in particular its attempts to explain the playwrights so-called lost years (roughly, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine), about which we know nothing; J. David Velleman, a philosopher, draws on the memoir, After Long Silence (1999), by Helen Fremont, as a means of examining the moral grounds for revealing repressed material as well as the respect repression at times deserves; Adam Foulds, the author of The Quickening Maze (2009), a novel that brings Tennyson and John Clare together, disarmingly defends the fictional depiction of historical figures by invoking the good faith of the writer, the good sense of the reader, and the great pleasure afforded by the physical embodiment of people we know to have actually lived (, page 290). Fleshly details bring alive Tolstoys Napoleon and Saul Bellows Ravelstein, a fictional portrait of the political philosopher Allan Bloom, and illustrate aspects of their characters.

The first half of the volume concerns itself with writing about the lives of others; the second half gives priority to writing about the self. That the distinction between self and other is not always clear is suggested throughout the volume, nowhere more so than in the chapters by Janis Freedman Bellow, Hermione Lee, and Karen A. Winstead, which could be thought of as forming a pivot or hinge between the two halves. Janis Freedman Bellow writes as the living model of a fictional character, Rosamund, in