Redefining the Genres of “Life Writing” : Margaret Mead’s Case Study
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Conventional definitions of the genres of autobiography and memoir seek to differentiate between them. In the last fifteen years, however, there has been a reevaluation of these genres. Referring to recent studies by George Fetherling (2001) and Helen Buss (2002), Julie Rak (2005) shows that memoirs are recently becoming the “substitution for autobiography” (501). This scholarly shift in perception towards the genres of “life writing” is also evident in the respective works of Leona Toker (1997) and Ilana Rosen (2014). Toker writes that the works of “documentary prose” which includes autobiography, memoir and letters are “a segment of the literature of testimony” (192). Rosen’s work also presents the relationship between the genres of autobiography and memoir as equal in the framework of “documentary literature” (5). Using the concept of “documentary prose” one can study women’s life writings, in terms of the relationship among the different genres and how they respectively contribute to addressing a woman’s life (Toker 188). The main goal of this project is to discuss the significance of supporting the redefinition of the genres of autobiography, memoir and letters according to “documentary prose” and “documentary literature,” while using Margaret Mead’s autobiography Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, her daughter’s Mary Catherine Bateson’s memoir With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s letters from To Cherish The Life of The World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead as a case study (Toker 188; Rosen 5). There is an urgent need to modernize the concepts of the genres of “life writing” and to treat them equally in order to uncover women’s history. |
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