Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968

Abstract

The meeting-point between memory studies and auto/biographical studies provides new perspectives on the study of the radical generation of 1968 through life-writing techniques, including oral history. A comparison between Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, published in 1986, and Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, published in 1988, suggests that belonging to this generation involves tensions between the social master narrative of 1968 and auto/biographical memories. Steedman and Passerini’s personal narratives relate in complex ways to this master narrative, and exploring these ambiguities helps us to generate further innovation in ‘generational thinking’ as well as a comparative understanding of the ‘memory studies’ of two of the most important thinkers in British and Italian contemporary history.