Travelling Through The Memory Lanes: Exploration Of Self Or The Socio-Political Existence

Abstract

Life writing has found its existence in memoirs, letters, eye-witness accounts and personal blogs on date unlike the bygone times which rooted its existence in biographies and autobiographies.  The transition from a strenuous and scholarly task of writing an autobiography/biography to the utmost viable options such as writing blogs/memoirs has brought down an uphill task to the easiest of a mole hill. The shift in the written forms of life writing visibly demonstrates the transcending of the boundaries of the popular genres. However, the very notion of penning down an individual’s life with uncompromising honesty sounds rather intriguing and abstract. The paper here attempts at highlighting the generic practice of life-writing that is mostly political in nature as against its definition of a faithful account of one’s life in its rudiments. Any piece of writing intends on eliciting a reader response that he/she is looking forward to. Life writing being one, too, tries to solicit a particular response from the reader. The sought for reader response is exemplar of the subjectivity of the writing and a particular consciousness that the writer seeks to create in the reader. The solicited reader response mandates a necessary re-look into the faithfulness of a life writing that defines itself as a personal account far from any form of socio-political imperative.