NEW DEPARTURES IN BIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY SOCIETY Workshops
60th SAES Conference / RenaissanceS
Université de Tours
3-5 June 2021
The event will be held by videoconference.
Renaissance individualism harbingered a generic new departure for biography, stemming out again from the Ancients — Plutarch, Suetonius, Laërtius — swerving off from the hagiographies and aristocratic genealogies of the previous age. Izaak Walton preceded John Aubrey, whom Ruth Scurr has recently resuscitated by a first-person biography, John Aubrey, My Own Life. Likewise, James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson invented both biography as a novelized genre and the figure of Dr Johnson in literary history. In the Hegelian days of Thomas Carlyle and his American epigone Ralph Waldo Emerson, the greatness of eminent individuals resided in the coincidence of their lives with the beginnings of new periods of history. In the 20th century these tables were toppled by the New Biographies (Virginia Woolf’s phrase), which Lytton Strachey’s epitomize. Like the history of the genre, most biographies are structured around destructuring catastrophes and catabases: existential hapaxes or recurring events compelling the subjects to new beginnings. Therefore, the most interesting lives are not so much determined by their past or rooted in the present of their milieu, but much rather as if pulled forward by their potential futures. So much so that life can be defined as an iterative, vortex-like process of new departures. It may be that the most remarkable biographies in English today are still written on the model of the New Biography in the sense that they are aiming to dislodge and challenge the received images of their subjects, in revisionist ways that entail new departures.
This workshop will welcome presentations on case studies, as well as theoretical or more general considerations on biography as a genre of writing. The cases and topics of application should be related to the English-speaking world, but with an absolute freedom to introduce other references to nourish the debates.
Conveners:
Jean-Charles Perquin: jean-charles.perquin@univ-lyon2.fr
& Joanny Moulin: joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr.
Désespoir de Paul au départ de Virginie, 1789, Moreau le Jeune, Médiathèque de Montpellier, Utpictura18.
ATELIER 24 : BIOGRAPHIE (BIOGRAPHY SOCIETY)
Nouveaux départs en biographie / New Departures in Biography
PROGRAMME
Jeudi 3 juin 2021 – Atelier 24.1
Modératrice: Myriam BOUSSAHBA-BRAVARD
13h30 Daniel STANDER – The Headless Zulu in England: Writing the (After-) Lives of Spirits in South Africa
14h Djofolo DOUMBIA – Bob Marley et Alpha Blondy : biographie comparative de deux reggae markers
14h30 Pascale MONTRÉSOR TIMPESTA – Le vortex biographique de Toussaint Louverture
15h Céline RICHARD – From a lighthouse against tyranny to very strange stars. Renaissance(s) in anglophone and Latin-American human rights literatures
15h30 Ruvani RANASINHA – Hanif Kureishi
Vendredi 4 juin 2020 – Atelier 24.2
Modérateur: Djofolo DOUMBIA
9h Issa CISSÉ – Le faux-procès de William Godwin, ou l’exigence de conformité entre vie et pensée : Godwin et Shelley, une autre lecture est-elle possible ?
9h30 Myriam BOUSSAHBA-BRAVARD – The Biographical Project. Writing and REwriting his diarieS: William J. Bull’s Papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge University, UK
10h Francesca MANZARI – New American Departures in the Lives of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault
10h30 Jean-Charles PERQUIN – From Vasari’s Biographies to Victorian Monologues
11h00 Joanny MOULIN – Lord Londonderry ou la résurrection problématique de Lord Castlereagh