Autobiography and Mediation

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.