2006 Mainz, Germany

Conference Report

5th International Auto/Biography Association Conference

Report by Helga Lénárt-Cheng

Harvard University

IABA organized its fifth conference in July 2006 in Mainz, Germany. More than 170 scholars participated from five continents. The wide range of cultures and languages represented was nowhere more tangible than at the merry singing session crowning the conference dinner, where people all sang songs from their own countries. The cordial, campfire-mood at this dinner characterized most of the conference: people were smiling even at the end of the seminar-laden, heat-wave-ridden workdays! This, of course was largely due to Professor Alfred Hornung and his professional and charming team of helpers. They dealt with everyone’s needs with such ease and kindness that I was only wondering how come they could not arrange with the powers above for a relief from the heat-wave.

When organizers of the conference chose the topic “Mediation,” their intention was to open up autobiography studies towards other disciplines, towards less familiar grounds. This, however, was not a mere politically correct, artificial gesture. For one could argue that the process of mediation, the opening up of boundaries has been the very motor of the development of autobiography studies in the last decade. This, of course, is the sign of the maturity of the field. Autobiography studies today is passed its navel-contemplating youth, its desperate attempts of self-definition, and has gained enough sovereignty as an academic discipline that it can afford to open up its boundaries. In fact, auto/biography studies (as the conference showed) is open towards so many different disciplines, towards so many forms, and traditions of life-writing (from genomics to brain studies, from the lyrics of GDR Punks to the life stories of Italian ice cream vendors), that the real challenge is not to generate, but to find a way to ride this powerful wave of mediation.

To only highlight a few of these challenges: organizers had to accommodate, or rather, “put into dialogue” an overwhelming variety of texts, languages, and disciplines. As far as the multitude of texts is concerned, it is enough to look at the brochure of abstracts to feel overwhelmed (or overjoyed) by the offer: texts by contemporary Australian, Aboriginal, Nigerian, Filipino-American, Native Indian, or former Yugoslavian authors; forms of life-writing as varied as tombstone inscriptions, hagiopics and auto-graphics. This abundance seems to render the once-urgent call for a “canonization” of marginal auto/biographical texts largely irrelevant. Yet, this wide spectrum of texts also presents a challenge in that speakers at these conferences can rarely assume that their audience will have read the text they are talking about. Perhaps the dominance of the cultural studies-approach over the textual analysis-approach can be seen as a response to this dilemma.

As far as the multitude of languages is concerned, the eternal problem of finding a lingua franca also arose. Indirectly, for the absence of the entire French contingent of life-writing studies reminded us of the exclusionary aspects of scientific linguistic communities. And directly, because the question arose during the IABA Business Meeting whether it would be possible to find even better ways to accommodate those speakers who are uncomfortable presenting in English.

And last but not least, the variety of disciplines represented (psychology, historiography, sociology, media studies, neuroscience, etc.) also raises challenges. Indeed, it is in the relation between auto/biography studies and other disciplines that the true significance of the term ‘mediation’ is revealed. For as several participants observed, the mediation between autobiography studies and other disciplines cannot be limited to autobiography scholars reaching out into other disciplines. In order for mediation to be truly dialogic, we also need to listen to what other disciplines have to say about auto/biography, for instance we need to invite specialists from other, neighboring fields to our conferences. An excellent example for this trend was set by the lecture of the psychologist Hans J. Markowitsch on autobiographical memory.

Perhaps Hermes, god of boundaries and of travelers who cross them, can caution us against a one-sided interpretation of the term ‘mediation.’ Hermes, who embodies the spirit of crossing-over by being both a messenger and a thief, reminds us that in transmitting a message, in mediating, something always gets lost. I was glad to hear Richard Freadman put these two aspects – the fruitful and the potentially distorting effects of mediation – into relation. For autobiography studies will only profit from this mediation, from this “dissolving” of boundaries if it develops the critical instance aimed at dismantling institutionalized constraint as part of its project to mediate, to overcome cultural and historical distance through the interpretation of works.

One could argue that the responses to these various challenges were bound together by story-telling. Although Paul Valéry’s dictum – “There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography” – is oft quoted in auto/biography studies, the dominance of this motif at this conference was revealing. I was struck by how many presenters confronted the autobiographical aspects of their research. Several speakers (among them Thomas Couser and Richard Freadman) addressed the question of their relation to their father as it is formed by the autobiographical writing those fathers have left behind, or by the autobiographical writing the son produces in an effort to get closer to the father. On a similar note, Bettina Stumm talked about the challenges she faced as a co-writer of a Holocaust-survivor’s memoir, while Gillian Whitlock talked about the limitations imposed by her own cultural situatedness upon her project investigating the relation of Islamic life-writing and the ‘war on terror.’ The fascinating thing was that in these critical instances the act of story-telling appeared both as a topic and a function. Story-telling functioned, even in this formal setting of an academic conference as an instinctive and powerful way of overcoming distance between the speaker and the listener. In this context, Paul John Eakin’s phenomenological emphasis on the significance (also for our critical practice!) of our everyday entanglement in stories – in our own stories and in the stories of others, in written and in told stories – seemed particularly well placed.

Mediation knows no boundaries… but as a conclusion, let me highlight a few characteristic manifestations of it – as a topic – at the IABA conference:

1. The first form of mediation that comes to the mind of the literary scholar is that of intertextuality. To only name a few presentations where intertextuality featured as a key concept: Mirjam Truwant offered an insightful, comparative reading of three Staël biographies; while Heidi Denzel de Tirado did a spirited, comparative study of filmic mechanisms aimed at challenging Mexican political ideologies.

2. Mediation in the sense of author-reader relation was also a prominent topic: Detlef Garz, for instance, and his group of social scientists presented a fascinating ongoing research project, focusing on an autobiography-contest from 1939, in which witnesses were asked to write about their own private lives in Nazi Germany. The background of this team in the social sciences offered a fresh perspective on the literary debate concerning the relation of author and reader.

3. Another popular topic was the role of mediation in publishing processes: among others, Jeremy D. Popkin explored the mediating function of academic autobiographies between the “professional self” and the “private self”; while Anna Fornari asked about the potentially distorting effects of representation in anthologies devoted to particular ethnic communities, such as North American Italian anthologies.

4. The issues of domination raised by the study of these publishing practices point to the more overtly political implications of autobiographical mediation. Among others, Sunciča Klaas drew attention to this political dimension when she read an autobiographical text against the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the aim of examining the relations with the ethical/narrative Other and the effects of this relation on moral normativity.

5. In a quite literal sense, the concept of mediation also applies to various media-representations of autobiographical performances. Susanna Egan, for instance, drew attention to the role of media in facilitating autobiographical fraud and imposture; while Ito Toshimi and Jean-Luc Pagès, in their presentation on mobile phones as a means of modernizing an ancient tradition of self-writing, studied how cyberspace alters modes of self-expression.

6. And last but not least, the mediation symbolized by the hyphen or slash in the name of our field – “auto/biography studies”- also prompted theoretical inquiry. Among others, Michael Glenday and Craig Howes explored the very relation of these two forms of life-writing: Glenday provided an interesting case (that of Norman Mailer) for how an unaccomplished autobiographical task can impede a biographical project; while Craig Howes emphasized how his own perspective as a life-writing scholar made him critically conscious of certain academic, publishing, and documenting practices.

The next IABA conference will take place in Hawai’i in 2008, and the topic will be ‘Language.’ Until then, we have plenty of time to mediate through the list-serve. Aloha in Hawai’i, in 2008!

Conference Report

5th International Auto/Biography Association Conference

Report by Carmen Birkle

Universities of Mainz/Vienna

With the publication of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001), Sidonie Smith (U of Michigan) and Julia Watson (Ohio State U) have provided scholars interested in life writing with a seminal reference book, offering a wide range of concepts, aspects, approaches, and methods that have been used over the last decades in the expanding field of autobiography studies. Simultaneously, Margaretta Jolly’s (U of Exeter) Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (2001) displays even more insights into the richness, multi-facetness, and depths of life writing. Both publications can be considered autobiography studies in a nutshell with their controversial debates about genre definitions, fact-and-fiction delineations, and many other cultural issues, one of which was the focus of the conference on “Autobiography and Mediation,” held from July 27 to August 1, 2006 at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz. This conference, with about 170 participants from all over the world, bringing together the Asian, African, European, Australian, and American continents, not only featured the authors of the above-mentioned studies, but also such equally eminent scholars as Susanna Egan (U of Vancouver), John Paul Eakin (Indiana U), Uduma Kalu (U of Ibadan), Gillian Whitlock (U of Queensland), Zhao Baisheng (U of Bejing), Hans J. Markowitsch (U Bielefeld), Thomas Couser (Hofstra U), Han Shishan (Shanxi, China), Kay Schaffer (U of Adelaide), David Parker (Chinese U of Hong Kong), Jim Lane (Emerson College), William Boelhower (U Padua / Louisiana State U), Richard Freadman (La Trobe U), Craig Howes (U of Hawai’i), and Thomas R. Smith (Pennsylvania State U), who have significantly shaped the field over the past three decades, together with the local organizer at Mainz, Alfred Hornung. When in 1999, Zhao Baisheng convened scholars from East and West for an international life studies conference and thus provided the founding moment for the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), he initiated further conferences in Vancouver, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and, this year, in Mainz, as the first European site.

True to its topic, “Autobiography and Mediation,” this venue not only became a mediating instrument between scholars from a multiplicity of national, ethnic, cultural, social, and religious backgrounds, but also mediated between the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, history, psychology, sociology, medicine, and performance art. Mediation, as Alfred Hornung explains in his exposé for the conference, takes place on three levels: “thematically between the self and the world, technically between the author and the chosen medium of self-representation” as well as in the form of “transdisciplinary methodology.”

Participants listened to Hans J. Markowitsch’s talk on “Autobiographical Memory” from a physiological psychologist’s point of view, explaining how different forms of remembering and memory can be visually observed in the brain. From a literary as well as sociological point of view, Thomas Couser focused on autobiography as a means of mediation between parents and children and thus between generations, whereas Susanna Egan investigated autobiographical impostors and the role of publishers and the media in communicating such imposture. Roger Sell (Ǻbo Akademi U) analyzed five dimensions of mediation in Churchilll’s My Early Life (1930). Rebecca and Joseph Hogan (U of Wisconsin-Whitewater), longtime editors of the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, discussed the expanding research on autobiographies of mental illness, while Margaretta Jolly, in a similar vein, investigated therapeutic letter writing.

A common theme in several contributions was the role of publishers in the marketing and mediation of autobiographies (e.g., Eva-Marie Kröller’s [U of British Columbia, Vancouver] talk on the role of Doubleday Publishers during World Wars I and II). From a moral and psychological point of view, David Parker elaborated on the possible good of life narratives and their potential for serving as guides for individual human lives. In the absence of Sidonie Smith, Kay Schaffer delivered their common paper on “Victims, Perpetrators, and Beneficiaries: Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Witness,” in which Smith and Schaffer suggest the witness as beneficiary and as a third position in-between victim and perpetrator, here in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in 1996. Even though the witness who writes about the hearings takes an unauthorized position, this positioning offers the possibility to mediate precisely between victims and perpetrators and can thus achieve a healing effect as well as forgiveness.

One of the memorable highlights of the conference was the dramatic performance by the Jamaican playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, and lecturer Trevor Rhone. The impersonation of his autobiographical play Bellas Gate Boy (2005) introduced a fascinated audience to the intricacies of remembrance, to the secrets of Rhone’s Jamaican and English life, and to Jamaican theater in general. This mediation through actual performance provided a deep insight into the technologies of the transformation of memory into visual expression.

Overall, both panel and workshop presentations and discussions revealed that the genre of life narrative can assume an impressive array of forms: on the one hand, the well-known written narratives such as letters, diaries, travelogues, captivity narratives, autobiographies (both factual and fictional); on the other hand, autobiographical expressions include films/videos, radio and tapes, photography, dance, quilting, graffiti, paintings, weblogs, autobiographies of the deaf, cyberspace, mobile telephones, and ecobiographies. Autobiographical mediation in its multiplicity was the focus of the conference, and the multiplicity, variety, and multi-facetedness of autobiography and life writing studies are indeed the impressions that have vividly emerged and have revealed a vibrating and interdisciplinary field of research that branches out into and joins all areas of life and its representation. The Mainz conference has certainly instilled in all its participants the recognition that life writing studies are essential in our understanding of life in its entirety. As Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms claim, “we live in an auto/biographical age. […] In every medium, cultures are permeated and increasingly transformed by auto/biographical narratives, productions, and performances of identity” (5-6)*.

*Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms, “Autobiography? Yes. But Canadian?” Canadian Literature 172 (2002): 5-16.

Conference Report

Report by Philip Holden

National University of Singapore

As many participants in a concluding forum at the conference noted, the notion of mediation is richly suggestive in a number of ways in auto/biography studies. It might, Tom Smith remarked, refer to a process of cultural or social translation, or to the role of the media or publishing networks. Richard Freadman phrased this slightly differently: mediation can be agential, referring to an active process, or more passive, describing the effects of the medium of transmission. The challenge to auto/biography studies might thus be to produce theoretical and critical approaches which might themselves mediate between these two definitions in analysis, preserving both the possibility of individual agency while remaining aware of the determining power of social and cultural structures.. And as Susanna Egan commented, the conference itself was a consummate act of mediation on the part of its organizers and participants, bringing together in Mainz participants working in vastly different cultural, disciplinary and critical contexts.

My report on the conference is necessarily partial: I’m someone who wandered into auto/biography studies from postcolonial and gender studies around the time of the third IABA conference in Melbourne, and–despite having finished the project that drew me into the area in the first place-have now realized that the constellation of issues figured by auto/biography studies is now much too interesting to walk away from. It is also selective: like every participant, I frequently had to choose between a number of tempting workshop sessions, and often discovered that I had missed a paper that everyone else seemed to have somehow managed to attend.

In the presentation sessions addressed to the conference as a whole, I found those given by Susanna Egan and John Eakin particularly stimulating. Egan’s talk focused on James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and in particular its media reception as an exemplary case of “auto/biographical imposture.” Plotting the text’s initial publication, its huge increase in sales due to its selection as the featured text in Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club in September 2005, and then Frey’s fall from grace after many events in the book were found to be invented, Egan noted that the media spectacle of Frey’s book was far more than just the demonstration of an individual’s culpability. Rather, the theatre of catharsis in which Frey, his publisher and agent, and indeed Oprah herself were all implicated raises important questions about the reception of such texts, and the manner in which what Egan in another paper at the conference called “sensational identities” are produced. Egan’s argument for an increased attention to the aesthetic properties of the text, and of the necessity for those of us who research in auto/biography studies to intervene in public debates, provoked lively discussion from the floor. As Craig Howes noted in the closing session of the conference, John Eakin’s notion of “relational selves” has become perhaps the most influential concept in the last decade in autobiography studies. True to form, Eakin didn’t rest on past glories, but urgently set about mapping new territory, examining the “back story” of autobiographies, the often fragmentary moments of self-narration that we perform continually in everyday life. While there has been much discussion of how children begin to learn to tell stories, Eakin suggested, adult self-narration has been unaccountably neglected, and would repay further study.

Among the many interesting workshop papers I saw, three stand out in my memory. Julie Rak explored autobiography as a social practice central to modern identity formation, suggesting the possibilities inherent in a quantitative “bottom up” approach to autobiography that would move beyond the close-reading of “limit texts” and yet remain critically and theoretically aware. Britta Feyerabend’s “Quilting as Autobiography” was exemplary in its interdisciplinarity, showing the possibilities of narrative and non-narrative self-representation inherent in a visual medium. Finally, Xu Dejin’s examination of the Chinese critical reception of Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston added a further dimension to my understanding and appreciation of these texts.

The fact that the above papers were written by scholars at different career stages (associate professor, graduate student, and postdoctoral fellow), from different continents, and from different disciplinary perspectives is a testimony to the richness of discussion and debate at the conference. Yet the conference also, despite the organizers’ and participants’ best efforts, also illustrated the difficulty of both interdisciplinary and intercultural work. Hans J. Markowitsch’s presentation on the physiology underlying Autobiographical Memory was fascinating, but in the question-and-answer session that followed, it seemed difficult to relate it to the more socially-embedded modes on inquiry practiced by most of the participants. Uduma Kalu and Han Shishan’s papers offered the potential of an examination of autobiographical traditions from Nigeria and China respectively, but the manner in which the papers were phrased and their mode of address limited interaction. Craig Howes’ suggestion that the 2008 IABA meeting concentrate on autobiography and translation-both linguistic and socio-cultural–was thus most apposite, and I’m looking forward to re-engaging with these issues there.

Alfred Hornung and his team worked tirelessly behind the scenes to produce a memorable conference. I’ll remember fondly an evening with graduate students at the Heiliger Geist, our conference dinner under the stars at Bacharach, and perhaps most vividly, a walk I and another participant took to the cemetery next to the university. We walked among graves with German and French names, discovered a whole section of the cemetery devoted to the Jewish community and-most unexpectedly row upon row of Muslim graves which, on closer examination, proved to be those of North African soldiers stationed here during the occupation after the First World War. If cemeteries provide a kind of collective social biography, then this was a text that was easy to interpret. Mainz itself has long been a place of cultural mediation, with all the struggles and possibilities that such actions involve, and thus an ideal setting for the conference.

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