Narrating a Life, Claiming a Voice: Autobiography and the Question of Agency in Biographical Writing

This article critically examines the influence of autobiographical material on biographical narratives and proposes the approach of life writing as a methodological and conceptual alternative. Autobiographies, due to their ideological, selective, and narrative nature, often impose a coherent and persuasive framework on the biographer, thereby blurring the boundaries between historical analysis and autobiographical fiction. This tension complicates the interplay between identity construction and historical context. Life writing, by incorporating a broad array of ego-documents, offers a multidimensional and interdisciplinary perspective that reconfigures biography as a critical, pluralistic, and reflexive practice. It emphasizes not only what is narrated but also how it is narrated—focusing on narrative strategies, silences, linguistic choices, and the subject's social positions. In this framework, the article reconsiders the nature of biographical subjects and seeks a renewed answer to the central question: “Whose story is being told?”