Autobiography historical source analysis

How to write a primary source analysis

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. This article examines the interplay between autobiographical texts and historiography through the lens of two prominent French historians, Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel. It posits that personal experiences significantly influence historical writing, revealing the subjective nature of historiography.

By analyzing the autobiographical narratives of Braudel and Kriegel alongside their scholarly works, the article explores how these narratives contribute to a deeper understanding of historical texts and the writing of history itself. This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution.

Autobiography as a source of history

At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as created a new form of academic life-writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical-autobiographical genre-including the subgenre of the "autobiographical paper"-and highlights its ability to function as both history as a retrospective account of the author's own past and theory as a speculative approach to historiographical questions.

I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians' autobiographies, including ego-historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline.

Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project. Experimentation and theorising on forms of life writing from the field of history has grown substantially in recent decades, as historians understand how autobiographical narrative may contribute to understanding both the past and our processes of accessing it.

Some contributors explore the convergence of history and life writing through an autobiographical voice, while others work theoretically or critically. Beyond these different approaches, all the essays explore to what extent autobiography serves historical writing and comprehension, and examine the theoretical and practical consequences of this convergence.

I analyse the constructed nature of experience through the concepts of immediate experience Erlebnis and reflected experience Erfahrung and suggest that the latter is grasped and expressed by narration. I also propose that human beings understand themselves and others as well as their lived reality and temporality through narration and that, in this sense, narration has ontological significance for a human being.