Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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The truth-value of autobiography is a problem for historians who want to draw on the rich autobiographical literature of the American South—so much so that historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach has devoted an entire book to the subject. Wallach argues provocatively in Closer to the Truth than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow that it is precisely the most fabricated elements of autobiography—its literary techniques such as imagery and metaphor—that make it uniquely valuable for capturing the intricate realities of a Jim Crow society that can be difficult for later generations to comprehend.

Along with historians of Jim Crow, historians of childhood have a particular need for an answer to the question of how autobiographical source materials can best be approached. Children leave few historical sources and almost none that capture what they were thinking and feeling when they were very young. By the time they are able to write letters, diaries, and other first-person accounts, which rarely survive anyway, “children” are actually much more like adults in many respects than they are like the infants or toddlers they—and every human being who has ever lived—once were. In the absence of child psychologists or other interested on-the-spot observers, only retrospective sources like autobiography and oral history can provide insights into the subjective experience of growing up.