Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material

Abstract

Certain aspects of historical reality can best be captured by literary autobiographies. Historical reality is inherently perspectival. Autobiography effectively describes the universe as it appeared from different acknowledged perspectives, enabling historians to rethink and refeel past experiences. Literary techniques such as irony and metaphor make autobiography a particularly evocative historical source material.

Crafting Words and Creating Dalit Histories

“…To apprehend past reality, the historian must draw on similarities between himself/herself and the historical subject. (Collingwood, 1946, p. 215) Hence, true historical knowledge is only possible when historical actors behaved in a rational manner and were motivated by conscious thought processes (Wallach, 2006, p. 447). The emphasis on rationality has been perceived to be a modern value.…”

“…‘Professional historians’ epistemology, their underlying assumptions about knowledge and the way it is acquired, has often turned into a set of assumptions about the way people live’ (Stearns & Lewis, 1998, p. 1). This epistemological bent has resulted in the devaluing of the emotional aspects of historical experience, but human behaviour and thus the inside of a historical event is not only cognitive but affective (Wallach, 2006, p. 448).…”

“…Human experience is a complex interplay of power, effect and perceptions, and archival materials can only hypothesize and speculate about any historical event. For people who are absent from genealogies, inscriptions, documents and other memorabilia of the past, ‘a well crafted memoir enables us, in a way that no other historical resource can, to re-experience the affective and cognitive inside of a historical moment’ (Wallach, 2006, p. 448).…”

Using personal experience in the academic medical humanities: a genealogy

“…All these would be fruitful avenues to explore (see e.g. Paperno 2004;Hellbeck 2004;Aurell 2006;Wallach 2006;Fulbrook and Rublack 2010). To take an example from this list of works, Jaume Aurell seeks to use autobiographical texts as historiographical sources; he connects autobiographies written by historians to the histories that they write.…”