And the subject speaks to you. Biographical narratives as memories and stories of the narratable self

Biographies in an everyday sense are seen as life stories of the speaker, ready at any given time to give account of how one arrived at this very moment in time. However, they are not neutral recordings of what had happened across one's lifespan, instead they are complex constructions, drawing on memories, affects, experiences and social and cultural knowledge. In terms of language biograpies, the multilingual self constructs itself by drawing on lived language experience (Kramsch 2009, Busch 2017). In order to understand how meaning-making is achieved in constructing autobiographies and biographical narratives, this contribution first revisits notions of experience, theories of memory and autobiography. In a second step, it draws attention to the speaking subject. Cavarero (2000) and Butler (2005), along with others, insist that the biographical narrative always asks for a second person and that the essence of biographical narratives lies between the narrator on the one hand and the addressee on the other. The addressed other is more than just an attentive listener - s/he is even ever-present, as we only come into being when being addressed as a self and hence as a child introduced to language. Biography and language thus never fully belong to one person alone, but the sense of self is strongly related to the ability to narrate one's life story, changing across the lifespan but consistent with the (changing) image of the self. This chapter will thus give an introduction to important notions in research on language biographies and will relate to Busch's work on language biographies exploring what happens if life becomes non-narratable to the speaker, i.e. in the case of trauma.