Centre for Life Narratives

We live in the age of life stories

In every format of every media and in every academic discipline, self-reflection, life writing, writing the self, offering one's life story within travel books, scholarly articles, broadcasts, political web sites or newspaper blogs has become a standard tool of communication and the dissemination of information in our time.

In publishing, broadcasting and self-broadcasting telling stories about our own lives and the lives of others is all-pervasive. This is also the age of the witness, the age of testimony in which first-hand accounts, personal experience, life change and evolution are valued, for good or ill, over distanced reflection, universal knowledge claims or philosophical meta-narratives.

While much is claimed for the value and significance of the life narrative, however, from the possibility of individual redemption to the constructing of national narratives of truth and reconciliation, the craft of constructing a life narrative remains under-theorised. Whether writing of our own lives in the form of auto-biography, memoir, MySpace or diary, or in our endeavours to research and write the lives of others, there is little sharing of experience or debate upon the nature of such endeavours across the many disciplines in which life narratives have become central preoccupations.

The purpose of the CLN is to bring best practice across all genres of life narrative work together in one physical and virtual space. We will use this meeting place for life writers as the basis for a Quarterly Journal focussed on the practice of life narration. We will bring together a cluster of existing Masters' degrees and PhD projects and develop new ones across disciplines. We will initiate research projects centred on the experience, methodology and formats of life narratives across written, visual, and virtual cultures.