9.20.2009

'Reading Autobiography' Notes

  • Life narrative is a moving target/ set of shifting self-referential practices that engage the past in order to reflect on identity in the present (3)

  • Re: Du Bois, A soliloquy on Viewing My life from the Last Decade of the 1st Century - Du Bois accepts the impossibility of recording only factual truth and turns tot he compensations of an inter subjectivity truth- part dream, promissory belief that invites the readers own interpretation.

  • Memory Triggers: Dreams, photos, albums, objects, stories, genealogy, smell, touch, taste, sound, public documents

  • Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller- Inter weaves herself as a creative and reverential voice bridging multiple cultures

  • Context of memory is politically charged: who and what is authorized to remember

  • Life narratives depend on memory that is constructed as records of acts of interpretation by subjects in a historical time and their relationship to their own changing past

  • Story telling within an extended family binds a groups of disparate individuals together (site of story establishes expectations) but some things are celebrated, others shunned. Content that is shared varies accordingly
Purpose to 'Past Matters'

  • Scriptotherapy
  • Memorializing Lives
  • Mediated through memory and language as an interpretation of the past
  • Retrospectively make experience and convey it to others through storytelling
  • Persuasion to belief is a fundamental component to story telling
  • Identities change based on content, time, and individual
  • Collective remembering: feeling of community by identifying with shared stories

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