I’ve read a lot of memoirs, autobiographies, personal essays, collected letters, and autobiographical novels in my life, but this is the first time I’ve studied the memoir/ autobiographical form as a genre. An interesting fact I learned right away was that the word “memoir” comes down to us from the Latin “memoria,” meaning memory or reminiscence, through the Anglo-French memorie in the mid-1500s, meaning “a note, memorandum, something written to be kept in mind,” to the first English usage of memoir in the 1670s, meaning a person’s written account of his life (Rasois).
Nowadays, the words” memoir” as well as “autobiography” have become variously interchangeable between the two. When I first began researching this genre of literacy, I thought I had a pretty vague, but still decent, understanding of the two words distinctions. I believed a memoir referred to an account of a portion of the writer’s life, focused not only on the writer, but also on the people who were influencing it and that an autobiography dealt solely on oneself and referred to the writer’s whole life.
Later, I found a very particular definition, or point of view, of a memoir that caught my attention. “A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life,” said Gore Vidal, “while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, and facts double-checked” (Vidal 37).
It struck me solely due to the how different he defined each literary term, not coinciding with mine. It is generally agreed the author of the first memoir was St. Augustine, a Catholic theologian who lived during the tail end of the Roman Empire.
The Essay on Trojan: Gothic Architecture And Word Meaning Word
What Trojan hero did the Romans considered themselves descended from? – Aeneas. What Greek historian described and explained Rome’s rise to power? – Polybius Who were the legendary twin brothers who founded Rome in 753 B.C.? – Romulus and Remus What three things did Polybius consider the main causes of Rome’s greatness? Which Hellenistic philosophy taught that we should strive for “ ...
In his Confessions, Augustine details the many sins of his youth in a Tom Sawyerish, bad-boy-stealing-apples way. The climax comes with his reading of St. Paul and subsequent conversion to orthodox Christianity and a life of chastity. Augustine also established a fundamental convention of the genre, the rationale, the point up front where the author explains why he’s writing his story and why it’s worth reading (Rasois).
After that, but still back in the day, when all the memoirs that had ever been written could fill in just a couple of bookcases, the form represented a brilliant innovation in its genre.
Or so it seemed to Samuel Johnson. Writing in 1759, he observed that the best kind of biography was one in which “the writer tells his own story. ” Such books benefited from their authors’ total command of the subject. Johnson argued, “Certainty of knowledge not only excludes mistake, but fortifies veracity. That which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of understanding, and alarm of conscience” (qtd. in Spengemann 127).
I feel even acquiring an alarm of conscience of the given facts doesn’t give the reader a true representation of what was really happening. While autobiographies make use of documentary records, memoirs are, almost by definition, literary representations of memory. And so, like memories, they may be inaccurate or willfully distorted. Henceforth, memoirs are not said to be representations of history, not when they merely come from memory. When writing my own personal memoir last year, I easily witnessed first-hand what that truly means.
The way I see it is that a memoir is not the larger story of a life, from birth to death, but may be a slice of that life, a window into the life through the author’s lens, the shaping of a single piece of experience, a crystallized version of “I remember. ” In the view of William Zinsser, “Memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The writer of a memoir takes us back to a corner of his or her life that was unusually vivid or intense, childhood for instance, or that was framed by unique events. By narrowing the lens, the writer achieves a focus that isn’t possible in an autobiography” (Spengemann 113).
The Essay on Autobiography 3
My name is Asella Ware, I am 16 years old. My birthday is November 12, 1996; I was born in Pontiac Michigan. My parent’s names are Tonya King and Joseph Ware. My parents are separated and remarried. I have 2 brothers and 1 sister. My brother’s name is Joseph he is 11 years old, the other one is Ajene he is 13 years old. My sister is Laneyna she is 18 years old. My child hood I went to Webster ...
In many ways, I think a memoir resembles an autobiography as piece of fiction, in being a single story, often using techniques from fiction to form a narrative of the subject. Autobiographies on the other hand, seem just a tad different from memoirs. But, looking at every historical fact and origin, the two genres have grouped together making it very difficult to research each term separately. It is mostly because every source that I’ve used pretty much sums up an autobiography in the same way: it is a certain style of narrative about someone’s own life.
It is generally presumed to be factual, but the way the narrative is written out, the emphases that must be made by an author may present elements more as imaginative thoughts that reveal something about the author’s inner self. I presumed this because before the 1970s, most literary scholars regarded autobiography as a sub-literary genre, important primarily as a source of one’s unreliable historical and biographical information (Cox 54).
To go into a little history on an autobiography, I will begin with where and who it inaugurated from.
It was the Frenchman Jean Jacques Rousseau who received the honor of writing the first modern autobiography suitably titled Confessions. What made this autobiography so impactful was Rousseau’s choice of words used in context throughout his book. For example, Rousseau wrote, “I will speak the truth; I will do so unreservedly; I will tell everything, the good, the bad, everything, in short” (Cox 44).
And he meant it. This journey for the unadulterated truth of his unique existence sets the standard for revelations of every autobiographer since then.
Rousseau detailed the sources of his own sexual tendencies, common enough at the time but surprising to actually see in print. What makes it such a revelation is that he also pointed the finger at his own moral guilt. One sees it blatantly because there’s an incident that he keeps coming back to throughout the majority of the autobiography: as a young man, he lied and had a servant girl dismissed for a petty crime, in consequence harboring a guilt that conditioned the rest of his life (Cox 52).
My views go against those literary scholars who deemed this form of literary information unreliable. Even if there were relatively few fully-fledged published autobiographies in the United States, especially as early as between 1820 and 1870, which happened to be one of the most fertile periods in American literary history, the forms of writing that best illuminated that half century included autobiographical writings such as diaries, memoirs, lives, histories, journals, narratives, confessions, adventures, recollections, and even novels and poetry (Buell 479).
The Term Paper on A history of writing in human civilization
What is this civilized thing called writing? Modern linguists define writing as a system of human communication by means of conventional, agreed-upon signals that represent language. The signs must be capable of being sent and received, mutually understood, and they must correspond to spoken words. Each written means began with simple pictures and plain strokes or dots - adequate for recording ...
Take also, for example, many of the most influential texts of the so-called American Renaissance, such as Walden and Leaves of Grass, which are mixtures of literary forms that include strong autobiographical elements but are not, strictly speaking, either autobiographies nor can they be distinguished as memoirs either (Thoreau 76).
The awkward matter of truth is what memoirists span the universe for and what they plan to achieve from it.
Some make a real effort to be accurate, while others would say that the truth, such as it is, is created in the writing; how they tell their stories offers a kind of truth in itself, whether or not this coincides with such facts as can be discovered. I agree with the other view of memoirists who believe it is created in itself from the writing. All history, in my point of view, is told by word of mouth. How factual or not it may seem, it is still passed down as knowledge from someone else telling it.
Whether it is filled with emotions and personal thought, like a memoir, or factual with specific dates and well examined research, like an autobiography or history book, for that matter, it is still just passed down information.
