La imaginación autobiográfica

The autobiographical imagination is the creative cooperation between a subject and a researcher, who are engaged in the construction of a writing on subjectivity. Even if the form can be literary, the content is cognoscitive: reading a social history through a life story. The present article look to the history of the biographical method in social sciences, showing ten authors and works selected as indicators of such national traditions, theoretical paradigms and narrative strategies. Each one of those models represent different conceptions of life histories as, respectively, memory of defeated, diasporic chronicle, biogram, crossed story, novel, film, ritualized oral exchange, countercultural hagiography, antibiography and dialogy.