| Autobiography, or to use a term that has become more fashionable, memoir is one of the leading literary phenomena in contemporary culture. The proliferation and popularity of this genre is easily explainable: everyone has a life and every life is worth telling or, as Dostoevsky sardonically claims at the beginning of Notes from Underground: But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?;Answer: Of himself.;Well, so I will talk about myself.;Yet, despite its present popularity, autobiography is not a recent phenomenon, but a genre that has been tracing its own boundaries for almost 2000 years. Starting with Augustine's Confessions, the history of memoir is characterized by a constellation of literary and philosophical questions on the nature of the self, and, more specifically, on what is meant and implied by narrating the self. One of the leading questions surrounding memoir is related to whether the eventual inconsistencies in the narration of events can assimilate it to fictional narration, or whether we should instead still regard it as nonfictional expression.;I defend the claim according to which autobiography as a form of "unweaving" the self stems from the cognitive construction of personhood, and from the notion of the narrative self. Memoirs, in other words, are not exclusively cultural products; they are active responses to the question of personal identity. It is in virtue of a cognitive and scientific analysis of autobiography that I reject the assimilation of memoir to fiction, and instead frame it as the narrative expression of what I will define as the authentic self. Seeing memoir as a form, or branch of fiction is not only mistaken, it misinterprets the intention and cognitive origin of this genre.;My conclusions, from the defense of memoir as nonfiction, to its cognitive origin are at basis of the construction of a narrative theory of autobiography. |
