On my first class of the ASTU 100 course at the University of British Columbia, our class discussed the difference between “memory” and “history”. I thought that was a very unique theme for an “English” class and I was very surprised by how quickly interested I was.
Our professor introduced this topic with a fast exercise and then we discussed what are some similarities and contrasts between this two important concepts. When she was talking about how a memoir has a much greater personal connection because it is generally very subjective and first-hand (rather than historical texts that are broader and perhaps have more ‘authority’ due to being data/evidence based), I could not help but wonder: “What about memoirs that were written during historical events or that tell us about daily life of citizens in the last decades or centuries? Can’t they be used as historical? Would they have more authority then?”
Two very specific books came to mind.
Anne Frank’s diary, for example. She clearly and very explicitly describes what her family went through in the 1940’s and testifies what she saw during the Nazi’s occupation of her hometown. Although being very informal, bias and sometimes imaginative, that diary is still a narrative of that historical time. Yes, it is through the eyes of one particular person, more precisely a young lady who did not comprehend all that was happening, but it still addresses, with detail, how the Nazi’s acted towards dutch citizens.
Same happens with fictional but fact-based novels such as “A very long engagement” or “Dear John”. In both those books/movies, we can highlight the notion of an audience. Those novels are about militaries that went to war in other countries and wrote back to their girlfriends explaining how they were feeling or what they were going through. Those letters are records of what was currently happening at that exact moment or that had happened hours before. These have date, time, description and analysis – which is the core of historical evidence.
So then, would that be considered a memoir or a historical text? How can we differentiate those two in such situations?
Professor Luger noted that both memoirs and historical papers are biased. They both use a specific connotation and “perspectives” and we have to take this to account when reading such texts. She also explained that both of them have audiences or in those cases, people that the protagonists wrote to.
Well, if that is the case, it just makes it more challenging to differentiate those genres. However, that distinction is possible and it is a practice that we, as first-year students, are going to learn.
http://www.annefrank.org/en/Anne-Frank/
http://nicholassparks.com/stories/dear-john/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Long_Engagement