ABSTRACT
In a pair of major books one on Andre Malraux and the other on twentieth-century French memoires Jean-Louis Jeannelle has made the case for this distinguished genre of life writing that had seemed to have fallen into untimely neglect. Despite Hart’s skepticism about the possibility of any private individual to speak history in memoir, we do have memoirs in the French sense in American letters. Recognition of this fact, however, is not helped by the potentially confusing use of the term memoir in English today. This view obviously complicates any notion of a spectrum running from the autobiographical at one pole to the egohistorical at the other, for the notion of separate public and private spheres and of a point of intersection between them is at bottom a fiction, though a deep-seated one that is heuristically productive. Recall the key distinctions Jeannelle invokes to establish his model, between the autobiographical and the egohistorical, and between “major lives” and “ordinary lives.”
