ABSTRACT
The concept of narrative was central to the debate between Hayden White and David Carr about the representation of historical reality: was narrative an arbitrary imposition of a culturally sanctioned literary form on an otherwise unstructured world of experience, or was it one of the deep structures of that world. Carr boldly argued for the essential narrative structure of perception itself. Any inquiry into the origins and purpose of autobiography and self-narration offers a lesson in point of view. Literary historians such as Georges Gusdorf, Karl J. Weintraub, and Elizabeth Bruss propose a period-specific, text-focused perspective stressing autobiography’s link to Enlightenment ideals in the West. Like architecture, life writing can also serve to create cosmograms. Drawing this parallel involves a huge asymmetry in scale as we shift from the collective expression of a people and its civilization to an individual’s account of a life course.
