Narrating life: Approaches to studying life narratives in the humanities and social sciences 1 Alexander Kiossev Abstract: This text describes the complex and methodologica lly discordant context of contemporary autobiography studies, an exceptionally rich field of research. Its unity turns out to be unstable; it consists of different traditions and is marked by a rupture between the humanities and social sciences. The latter leads not only to scattering and non-dialogical methodological and technical research approaches, but also to radically different formulations of the objects of study. ‘Chinese walls’ gradually emerged between scholars in the humanities, who study published autobiographies and memoires, and social scientists, who devote their efforts to oral stories collected through interviews in concrete situations. The text discusses the complex methodological, philosophica l, and practical conflicts and dilemmas stemming from this unfavourable separation and forms its own position situated between the dominant scholarly and political attitudes. Alexander Kiossev is a professor of the cultural history of modernity, director of the Sofia University Cultural Centre, and editor-in-chief of the online journal Piron. His research interests lie in the field of surveys of reading, the cultural history of Communist totalitarianism, and autobiographical studies. He has published several books and edited multiple edited volumes in English, German, and Bulgarian. His articles have been translated into English, German, French, Dutch, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Macedonian. E-mail: akiossev@gmail.com Autobiography as a Classical Problem within the Humanities Philosophy’s engagement with the modern (published and literary) 2 autobiography is long- standing and oscillates between extremes. The lives of notable people as told by themselves have traditionally been considered not only an exciting but also a morally instructive reading (on this cf. Misch 1949, 1989). However, many sceptics doubt that the secret of an individual’s life can be told at all, and accuse autobiographers of committing literary lies, vanity, narcissism, sentimental Rousseauism, and the like. 3 1 First published in Bulgarian in the electronic jo urnal “Piron”, 2018, issue 15, https://piron.culturecenter- su.org/alexander-kiossev-narration/. 2 The modern literary autobiography that emerged at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries differs from the spiritual and religious autobiography of Antiquity, whose paragon is St. Augustine’s Confessions . In the religious genre, a person is not a unique individual but the model of a soul, striving to reach God (Schwalm, 2014). 3 It is telling that in 1798 Friedrich Schlegel wrote: ‘Pure autobiographies are written either by neurotics who are fascinated by their own ego, as in Rousseau’s case; or by authors of a robust artistic or adventuresome self -love, such as Benvenuto Cellini; or by born historians who regard themselves only as material for historic art; or by women who coquette with posterity; or by pedantic minds who want to bring even the most minute things in order before they die and cannot let themselves leave the world without commentaries. [They] can also be regarded as mere plaidoyers