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Dictionary:

autobiography

  (ô'tō-bī-ŏg'rə-fē) pronunciation
n., pl. -phies.

The biography of a person written by that person.

autobiographer au'to·bi·og'ra·pher n.
autobiographic au'to·bi'o·graph'ic (-bī'ə-grăf'ĭk) or au'to·bi'o·graph'i·cal adj.
autobiographically au'to·bi'o·graph'i·cal·ly adv.
 
 

Biography of oneself narrated by oneself. Little autobiographical literature exists from antiquity and the Middle Ages; with a handful of exceptions, the form begins to appear only in the 15th century. Autobiographical works take many forms, from intimate writings made during life that are not necessarily intended for publication (including letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and reminiscences) to the formal autobiography. Outstanding examples of the genre extend from St. Augustine's Confessions (c. AD 400) to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1951).

For more information on autobiography, visit Britannica.com.

 
Psychoanalysis: Autobiography

As a literary genre, autobiography, narrating the story of one's own life, is a variation of biography, a form of writing that describes the life of a particular individual. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, autobiography is of interest as the story told by the patient to the analyst and to himself.

Autobiography in the modern sense began as a form of confession (Saint Augustine), even though there are memoirs in classical literature (Xenophon's Anabasis, Julius Caesar's Gallic wars). Such introspective works can be considered attempts at self-analysis before the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious. In 1925 Freud wrote An Autobiographical Study, in which the story of his own life merges with that of the creation of psychoanalysis. According to Freud, biographical truth does not exist, since the author must rely on lies, secrets, and hypocrisy (letter to Arnold Zweig dated May 31, 1939). The same is true of autobiography. From this point of view, it is interesting that Freud framed his theoretical victory and the birth of psychoanalysis in terms of a psychological novel.

The function of autobiography is to use scattered bits of memory to create the illusion of a sense of continuity that can hide the anxiety of the ephemeral, or even of the absence of the meaning of existence, from a purely narcissistic point of view. This story constitutes a narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1984-1988) but is self-contained. In contrast, the job of analysis is to modify, indeed to deconstruct, this identity through interpretation. Because the analyst reveals repressed content, he is always a potential spoiler of the patient's autobiographic story (Mijolla-Mellor, 1988).

Although autobiography has been of greater interest to literature (Lejeune, 1975) than to psychoanalysis, a number of psychoanalysts (Wilfred Bion and Marie Bonaparte, among others) have written autobiographies, thus confirming the link between the analyst's pursuit of self-analysis and autobiographical reflection.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1925). An autobiographical study. SE, 20: 1-74.

Lejeune, Philippe. (1974). Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil.

Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1988). Suvivreà so passé. In L'autobiographie. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

——. (1990). Autobiographie et psychanalyse. Le Coq-Héron, 118, pp. 6-14.

Ricoeur, Paul. (1984-1988). Time and narrative (Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1985)

—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

 
Grammar Dictionary: autobiography

A literary work about the writer's own life. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa are autobiographical.

 
Literary Glossary: Autobiography

A narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story. Examples include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Amy Hempel's story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," which has autobiographical characteristics even though it is a work of fiction.

 
Word Tutor: autobiography
pronunciation

IN BRIEF: The story of one's life written by oneself.

pronunciation Since he was only six, Jeremy thought he should be a little older before writing his autobiography.

 
Quotes About: Autobiography

Quotes:

"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self." - W. H. Auden

"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another." - Augusto Roa Bastos

"Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form -- it may be called fleeting or eternal -- is in neither case the stuff that life is made of." - Walter Benjamin

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form." - John Berger

"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become." - Fawn M. Brodie

"Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst." - Italo Calvino

See more famous quotes about Autobiography

 
Wikipedia: autobiography
For writing autobiographies on Wikipedia, see WP:Autobiography
For music albums named Autobiography, see Autobiography (album)
Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.
Enlarge
Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.

An autobiography, from the Greek autos, 'self', bios, 'life' and graphein, 'write', is a biography written by the subject or composed conjointly with a collaborative writer (styled "as told to" or "with"). The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review, but the form is much older.

Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. A name for such a work in Antiquity was an apologia, essentially more self-justification than introspection. John Henry Newman's autobiography is his Apologia pro vita sua. Augustine applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau took up the same title). Probably the most famous German autobiography is still Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit.

A memoir is slightly different from an autobiography. Traditionally, an autobiography focuses on the "life and times" of the character, while a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. In the eighteenth century, "scandalous memoirs" were written (mostly anonymously) by prostitutes or libertines: these were widely read in France for their juicy gossip. But memoir has another meaning too. The pagan rhetor Libanius framed his life memoir as one of his orations, not the public kind, but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on. In more recent times, memoirs are also life stories which can be about the writer and about another person at the

Until the last 21 years or so, few people without some degree of fame tried to write and publish a memoir. But with the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs Angela's Ashes and The Color of Water more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.

Paul Delaney has coined the term "ad hoc autobiography" to describe an autobiography motivated by the desire to exploit some temporary notoriety. Such autobiographies, often written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published on the lives of professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities admit to not having read their "autobiographies."

The term fictional-autobiography has been coined to define any novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own biography. These novels generally do not follow a strict autobiographical guideline as they are still fictional. Carol Shield's novel, "The Stone Diaries" is an example of a fictional autobiography. The term "alphabiography" has been coined to denote an autobiography that consists of twenty-six chapters, the title of each starting with a different letter of the alphabet.

A fairly common joke to describe things which make no sense or pointless jokes states "That made as much sense as having an autobiography with an attached page saying 'About the Author'."

Notable autobiographies

Secondary literature

  • Barros, Carolyn A. "Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation". Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1998.
  • Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. "The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse Since 1800". Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
  • Lejeune, Philippe, On autobiography, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
  • Mostern, Kenneth: "Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America", New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Nericcio, William A. "Autobiographies at La Frontera: The Quest for Mexican-American Narrative." The Americas Review 16.3-4 (1988): 165-87.
  • Olney, James: "Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing". Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
  • Pascal, Roy. "Design and Truth in Autobiography". Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
  • Stover, Johnnie M., Rhetoric and resistance in black women's autobiography, Gainesville, Fla. [u.a.] : Univ. Press of Florida, 2003

    See also


     
    Misspellings: autobiography

    Common misspelling(s) of autobiography

    • authobiography

     
    Translations: Translations for: Autobiography

    Dansk (Danish)
    n. - autobiografi, selvbiografi

    Nederlands (Dutch)
    autobiografie

    Français (French)
    n. - autobiographie

    Deutsch (German)
    n. - Autobiographie

    Ελληνική (Greek)
    n. - αυτοβιογραφία

    Italiano (Italian)
    autobiografia

    Português (Portuguese)
    n. - autobiografia (f)

    Русский (Russian)
    автобиография

    Español (Spanish)
    n. - autobiografía

    Svenska (Swedish)
    n. - självbiografi

    中文(简体) (Chinese (Simplified))
    自传

    中文(繁體) (Chinese (Traditional))
    n. - 自傳

    한국어 (Korean)
    n. - 자서전

    日本語 (Japanese)
    n. - 自伝, 自叙伝

    العربيه (Arabic)
    ‏(الاسم) السيره الذاتيه وتعني قصه حياة الكاتب‏

    עברית (Hebrew)
    n. - ‮סיפור תולדות החיים של המספר, אוטוביוגרפיה‬


     
     

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    Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Psychoanalysis. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Copyright © 2005 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Grammar Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
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