Auto/Biography and Mediation: 5e Congrès de l’Association Internationale d’Auto/Biographie 27-31 juillet 2006, à Mayence (Allemagne)

Report by Jean-Luc Pagès (Nagoya)

What makes the difference between one conference on autobiography and others? International Auto/biography Association gatherings are more than just academic events. Ending the conference dinner with polyphonic songs in Gaelic, Maori and other languages, we felt autobiography was being interpreted by the participants themselves!

The theme of ‘Autobiography and Mediation’ chosen by Professor Hornung, and his team at the University Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz in Germany, crossed many boundaries, and remains a term whose definition is controversial. Mediation, or mediatization, is first of all that of media, from traditional editions to the era of multi-media. But media was also about crossing cultures. This was part of the challenge of the conference itself, which was international in scale, and lasted 5 days, with 10 plenary presentations and 49 workshops gathering 138 interventions, 40 of which will be published in two volumes. The 131 speakers came from five continents: Asia (15), Europe (71), Russia (1), Africa (2), South Africa (5), North America (42) and Australia (10).

The Asian field was happily present, particularly in Mandarin. One notable example was a discussion of Chinese biography about tombstones (Zhang Xinke). However, an absence of certain linguistic representations was also mentioned in the report of Helga Lénárt-Cheng for French Studies. We note only “l’autobiographie potentielle” of Perec, through his written and filmed work, by Regine Strätling, the approach by Heidi Isaken of Annie Ernaux and Nina Bouraoui’s works from “refoulé social” according to Pierre Bourdieu and, for the Francophonie, Acadian France Daigle (Monika Boehringer) and Patrick Chamoiseau (Alexandra Emberley).

The treatment of the auto/biography is done then in the framework of Post-cultural studies, in which translation in French to “post-colonial” was always controversial. The study of migrants’ stories is a major one and integrates other approaches that focus on the literature of “minorities”: Afro-Americans (Yvonne Gutenberger), Amerindians (Gretchen Eick, Iping Liang), Latino-americans (Jewish-Latinos by Markus Heide, Nyuricains by Christin Freyer), the Asian diaspora (Rocío Davis)… In fact there were less historical studies on the two World Wars (Jane Mattisson) and the holocaust (Bettina Stumm, Isabel Wojtowicz), then on the life writings of migrants exposed to the intercultural difficulties. Anglo-Saxon researches also integrate contemporary major events very quickly, such as September 11th with the analysis by Mary Ann Snyder-Körber of the portraits published in the New York Times in 2001-2002. The contribution of Susanna Egan to auto/biographical imposture and the role of the media, also enabled us to re-value the crossings between individual and collective memory.

In the field of social science, the topic of family and inter-generational problems in South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom (Thomas Couser, Kate Douglas, Leili Golafshani) was crossed with other social problems through curative writings concerning breast cancer (Ricia Chansky), AIDS (Astrid Haas), the desire for revenge (Elisabeth Hanscombe), deaf people (Marcus Rieth) and others. Religion was also a major theme, often in relation to current affairs: (Moslem women by Katherine Platt, the mediation of Islam by Nicole Waller), an ethnological approach (the tribal religions in the travel writings of Greene, Lévi-Strauss and Chatwin by John Barbour). Mediatization at the level of editorial process framed two communications topics (Marijke Huisman, Julie Rak).

The technological impact of the Internet was also widely discussed. Joel Haefner presented on blogs, electronic diaries and virtual spaces as a means of audio-visual exchange. After the status of place after the digitalization of ego-documents and their scientific treatment (French software Arcane, Porphyry Project, Hyper Nietzsche...), I presented with Toshimi Ito a corpus of private electronic diaries, in the form of Japanese short poems (tanka), collected in 2005-2006 from Internet sites which are designed to fit to the sites for mobile phones.

Genre studies also provided a theme. Autobiography and life writing were the most prominent, though some discussed correspondence (Irina Golovacheva), the personal diary (Maryemma Graham) and the logbook (Teachers of the 20th century: log book of classes in Alaska by Kathleen Boardman). Margaretta Jolly’s humorous intervention about confusions between e-mails and posted mails was much appreciated. Equally, the audience enjoyed presentations on the newly prominent art of graphic memoir, in Tanya Y. Kam and Gillian Whitlock’s paper on the Iranian Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

The cinema was another subject of debate (Nathaniel Kahn: My Architekt by Roger J. Porter), aided by presentations on the photographic image and performance (Chris Barry), partly due to technological modernization (digital images and objects as autobiographical icons analysed by Sally Berridge). The disaffection with the travel writings was also perceptible, with only three communications on this subject, the nurse voyageurs at the XIXst century in the United States (Caremne Birkle), the travel diaries in China of Stephen Spender and David Hockney (Teresa Brus) and that of Thomas Goltz in Azerbaijan (Kylie Cardell).

Lastly, let us note a potential future interest in the new genre of “Ecobiography”. Based on the neologism “ecotone”, a kind of mediatization between the ego and the eco (Micha Edlich, Kerstin Martin, Zhao Baisheng), the ecobiography would be one of the demonstrations of our literary mythomanias (“Biomythography” according to Miriam Strube). After the bad politics of much old-style life writing, here is a clean and alternative genre!

The difficulty in finding a lingua franca for the conference and the diffusion of research was perhaps the Association’s concluding message. This is why Craig Howes wishes to concentrate on linguistic diversity for the 6th Congress in 2008 in Hawai’i'. I recommend without reserve that you participate, as it is quite difficult to find a reception as cordial as on the Pacific’ islands. Aloha!