ABSTRACT
In the scholarly literature on written autobiographies and life stories elicited by interviews it is possible to discern two main views. One emphasizes the ‘life’, the other the ‘story’. In history and the social sciences, the life is most often emphasized, in the sense that the facts are given priority, while the narratives are means to the end of discovering and presenting the facts. Other approaches emphasize the narrative aspects of life stories. Within the poststructuralist turns in literary criticism, a life story is seen as an illusion, belonging to the genres of fiction rather than to the realm of history. My aim in this paper is to attempt to overcome the dichotomy implied in these different ways of reading life stories. I want to demonstrate that written autobiographies can be considered valuable material for ethnographic analysis as well as why and how it can be fruitful for social scientists to borrow some insights from analyses of antobiographies within literary criticism for the examination of life stories written by ‘ordinary people’.
