Auto/Biography and Mediation: 5th International Auto/Biography Association Conference

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.