For my A-level dissertation, I am analysing my grandfather’s autobiography, and I would therefore like to know how one can maintain an academic distance from a text of a personal and emotional nature.
Hello Lisa
Thank you very much for your excellent and thought-provoking question, which I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. It’s something that’s on my mind a great deal too. Even if you’re not writing about your own family, topics relating to politics, the environment or violence, for example, can still have a profound effect on you.
To create some distance, it can be helpful to look for what is collective, shared, general or structural within the individual case. So you can reflect on the individual case in all its particularity, but at the same time look for what that individual case shares with many others.
Which general and shared aspects are relevant depends entirely on your line of inquiry. Your grandfather, for example, was part of a particular generation. He was socialised as a man; he had an education or a profession; he had hobbies and passions. He shared all of this, and much more besides, with a great many other people.
Many people have written autobiographies, and often these autobiographies, in the way they are told, share many similarities, even though the lives lived are very different. If you place this very personal life story in the context of currents of thought, historical events, shared practices, forms of writing or rituals, then the insights your writing brings to light become much more objective. This also allows you to gain some distance from it, because it is not just about your grandfather, but about your grandfather as a person of his time, as a member of a particular social class – as a person shaped by specific historical experiences and so on. When you write about one person, you are always writing about many people as well.
A second approach might involve simply reflecting on your own method. How do you know what you know? Did you analyse the linguistic imagery in the autobiography? Did you compare it with other autobiographies? Did you pay attention to colour symbolism or the inclusion of external sources? Did you pay attention to representations of masculinity, social class or ethnic identity? When you explain to yourself and your readers the criteria and methods you used to produce your own text, it becomes much more scholarly and objective. This is because its structure is not shaped by arbitrary whims, but by criteria that you have set, which you can name and which readers can understand. In doing so, you create a framework that you yourself can use for guidance should you be unsure of what you’re doing or whether it is scientific.
Finally, I’d like to point out that emotions are very valuable – even in academia! Emotions tell us a great deal about the perspective from which we view a topic, what effects – including political ones – a topic may have, and lead us to issues that are important but which we may not yet be able to articulate or grasp intellectually. Emotions are not merely arbitrary or individual either; rather, they are closely linked to the society in which we live, to the images we have grown up with, and to the aesthetic qualities of the subjects we are studying. Following emotions and taking them seriously as a form of insight can therefore also be an important step in academic work.
I wish you the best of luck with writing your Matura thesis. As I said: the question you asked me cannot be fully resolved. Even in my own work, I’m constantly reflecting on this and looking for new ways to maintain a sense of detachment without denying the emotions. I’m curious to see what solutions you come up with for yourself.
Best regards
Sebastian
Thank you very much for the accurate and informative answer.