Sidonie smith autobiography template

Autobiography, the art of recounting one's life story, transcends mere chronological listing of events.!

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson lay out a sophisticated, theoretical approach to life writing and the components of autobiographical acts, including memory.

This book aims to be at once a comprehensive critical introduction and a retrospective study of autobiography.

Autobiography, the art of recounting one's life story, transcends mere chronological listing of events.

It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital.

Reading Autobiography is a step-by-step introduction to the differences of self-narrative from fiction and biography.

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson CHAPTER 9 of Reading Autobiography.pdf

Preprint from Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (2nd extended edition).

CHAPTER 9 A Tool Kit: Twenty-four Strategies for Reading Life Narratives You pick up a memoir in your local bookstore that looks interesting and read the opening page. Or you’re asked to read a well-known autobiography for a college course or exam.

Or you come upon a personal narrative in an archive you’re perusing for a history project. Or you find yourself a captive listener at a family gathering during which people regale one another with stories of the past.

We take a retrospective look at the essays we authored over nearly three decades of scholarship on life writing.

Given the complexity of autobiographical acts that we have charted in chapters 2 and 3, what kind of questions might you ask as you become immersed in these autobiographical narratives? How exactly might you read them? In this chapter we present you with a “tool kit” for appr