Embalming Life or Celebrating Action? A Case Study in the Interrogation of Identities

Resumo

Biography is a branch of history whose forms and methods of representing a person’s life have changed according to the historical and political contexts of the time. They can be found in the form of diaries or letters, memoirs, memories of living witnesses, official archives - all of them accounts which were sometimes ruined by excessive adulation, prudishness, gentility or prolixity. In the last decades biography, like autobiography, has become a literary form of great importance not only for the academy but also of popular interest. Different postmodern modes deal with the private and public politics of representation introducing intense self-conscious narratives. Thus, the representation of the other (and the self) reveals the problematic relation of the private and the public. History as private experiences brought to public consciousness, counterpoised to private revisions of public experience, also aims to construct a public collective awareness of the past.