Abstract
This article aims to present how the archives of modern autobiography begin and how they can help the studies of memory and forgetfulness, the raw material for the writings about the self. The autobiographical gender becomes stronger after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and is now more and more common. The struggle against the forgetfulness, the desire of being heard, of registering one’s existence, leaving behind one’s own testimony of what has been one’s life, this has never been so current as it is now in the beginning of the 21st century, when everyday people are sharing their personal life with friends as well as with people they don’t know. Blogs, Facebook, professional pages filled with photos get multiplied on the net. There are many who transform the social networks into outlets for reality and build up personalities and lives which have little to do with what they actually live. The photos have a good resolution and are taken at “photogenic” places, edited with Photoshop. But, in the middle of these millions of instantaneous publications, there are associations which are still concerned about the contemporary autobiography written in traditional molds. In this article, we develop an analysis of the APA (Association pour l’Autobiographie) to investigate the role played by autobiographical writings on paper in the digital era.
Keywords
autobiographical archives; memory; non-literary autobiography