How does a life become a text? Autobiographies, memoirs, and biographies are always narrative reconstructions that select and organize, explain and interpret, attributing meaning to the disparate events of a life. From the individually lived experience, behavioral and role models, "prototypes" of social experience and historical understanding emerge. The processes of self-reflection, meaning-making, and identity construction involved have been extensively studied by philosophers, literary scholars, psychologists, and sociologists. This volume presents the most important texts—from Dilthey and Freud to Bourdieu and Derrida, and up to Harald Welzer and Judith Butler.