The Fifth International Auto/Biography Association Conference (IABA), Mainz

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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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!