[00:00.00]Listen to part of the lecture in a literature class.
[00:03.94]Professor: Okay, Um, in in today's class, uh, I want to talk a little bit about autobiography and memoir. [00:12.24]They're both terms for genres of writing, writing about your own life, but they're different. [00:20.08]And I want to talk about, well, I wanna start by talking about the relationship between the two words. [00:26.69]Um, if you look at the word autobiography, and that's probably a more familiar term, the story of a person's life as written by themselves. [00:37.09]And the three roots in the word are very clear: AUTO, which means self, BIO, which means life and GRAPH, which has to do with writing, uh, memoir, may be, a less familiar term. [00:53.90]And I wanna spend a little more time talking about it. [00:57.03]It comes to English, borrowed from French. [01:00.26]And its meaning, as I think you can see in the word, is uh, sort of related to memory.
[01:08.20]Now, there's some important differences of how these types of writing are approached. [01:13.70]And autobiography generally is an attempt by the person to tell the whole story of their life. [01:20.77]Uh, they are writing it themselves, but they attempt to be relatively objective. [01:26.87]Uh, they tend to start at the beginning and well, they go as far as they can. [01:32.65]Um. memoir is is really trying to do something different um, in that. [01:38.40]It's it's not necessarily the attempt to tell the whole story of a life. [01:43.13]And it can be even more subjective. [01:46.70]I should uh, could make a distinction, between uh, maybe what I'll call the traditional memoir, or the sort of memoirs that were more common in the past tended to be pieces of writing about an external event, written by someone who participated in that event.
[02:06.06]So you might have a famous statesman or politician typically writing about important political or world events they were involved in. [02:15.44]And and you'd read that kind of memoir to get sort of more of a subjective view of what happened. [02:22.30]Then there's the contemporary memoir. [02:26.43]It's a kind of writing with with even more focus on the individual and on the experience of the writer themselves. [02:34.28]And uh, compared to autobiography, memoirs, contemporary memoirs are usually a lot more limited in scope. [02:43.31]They often deal with just one period in someone's life. [02:47.55]A lot of great contemporary memoirs have been written on uh. themes of childhood, or you can also have memoirs that deal with just an aspect of someone's life. [02:58.09]Uh, there's a great one by a woman named Vivian Gornett called fierce attachments. [03:04.30]Uh, it covers about 20 or 30 years of her life. [03:07.97]The whole focus of the book is just on her relationship with her mother. [03:13.34]And and so it's it's sort of, it's uh, the story of her and her mother and their relationship. [03:20.48]So,um, autobiography places, most of its emphasis on the importance of a person's life and what they accomplished uh, in a memoir. [03:30.87]And here we can go back to how it's related to the word memory. [03:35.66]The focus is on the writer's perception, and how they they felt or what their own view of their experience was. [03:45.42]Uh, memoirs focus not so much on getting the facts right, as on giving the reader very vivid sense of what some part of their life felt like. [03:57.07]Perhaps for that reason, with memoir, you often get into questions about truthful ness or accuracy. [04:04.59]Uh, so there have been a number of memoirs where there's been a controversy of about whether it should be considered a true, a very subjective story of someone's life and experience, or if it's sort of crosses the line into fiction.
[04:22.25]Any questions at this point?
[04:24.40]Student: Uh, has there ever been a case of competing memoirs?
[04:29.00]Professor: Um, a case of
[04:31.19]Student: Two people writing about a similar
[04:34.52]Professor: Oh, I'm sure sure
[04:36.08]Student: The same experience.
[04:38.04]Professor: Oh, I'm sure inevitably. [04:40.00]Uh, you see that a lot in contemporary politics, uh, how many memoirs are out there about the Clinton administration? [04:47.94]Uh, probably about a couple of dozens. So. So yeah, absolutely.
[04:52.58]Student: It seems like this has become a very popular form.
[04:55.83]Professor: Aha.
[04:56.34]Student: And it, I mean, I know of a writer and there was a competition in her family to give the uh the most authentic account of how things were when they were growing up. [05:06.47]And there's been several of them written
[05:08.29]Professor: Yeah, the most authentic or the most, you know, self-serving.
[05:12.30]Student: I'm sure that's open to debate.
[05:13.81]Professor: Yeah.
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