"vers l'incalculable d'une autre pensée de la vie"

Category: Events Page 3 of 8

2nd Conference of the Biography Society: Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures & Societies (19-21 Sept. 18, Groningen)

Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures & Societies

September 19-21, 2018

 

Click here to read the press release
PROGRAMME
PROGRAMME

Abstract

On 19-21 September, 2018, the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen will host a conference designed to take a look beyond our own borders and delve deeper into the question of how the art of biography is practiced in other parts of the world. Biographers from different continents will gather to examine the ways in which their foreign colleagues practice their craft and discuss the cultural perspectives that guide biographers in their approach to the infinite complexity of the other. Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies will bring together biographers from France, Great Britain, Vietnam, South Africa, China, the United States, the Netherlands, and other nations, whose work reflect the global diversity of biographical practice. For the participants, it will provide an opportunity to learn about international research in the field.

In addition to Richard Holmes’ adage ‘biography as a handshake across time’, we would like to know how biography can contribute to a better understanding of differences between societies and cultures. How can biographers from different parts of the world learn from each other, without becoming all the same? For this purpose, we call on our speakers to inform us about the history and the state of the art concerning biography in their own countries. By doing so, speakers can show how in their cultural background biography functions as a public genre, featuring specific societal issues and opinion-making. Presumably, this could lead to a different thinking about the role of biography in society.

To contribute to the discussion about the national perspectives in biography, the following subjects thus can be explored:

  • Religion
  • Current topics in biography
  • Societal pioneers (‘untimely individuals’)
  • Censorship
  • Biographical criticism
  • Access to archives
  • Foreign biography in each country
  • The publishing world
  • Transnational similarities
  • Biography in public space

The conference is jointly organized by the Biography Institute, the Biography Society and Biographers International Organization. Owing to these organizations’ expansive networks, a broad group of prominent researchers and biographers will be present. Richard Holmes will give the keynote lecture and Nigel Hamilton will host a masterclass on Biography.

 

SAES2018: Biography Society Seminar : Revolutionary Lives (7-9 June, Nanterre, Paris)

Astract and Programme for our Seminar at the 58th Congress of the SAES

Congrès annuel de la SAES 2018 à l’Université Paris Nanterre, 7-9 juin 2018 : « Revolution(s) »

Abstract

The word ‘life’ is constantly revolving around the axis of writing: a life is both a biography and its topic. In a sense, we write our lives as we live them. Lives that go on being written after the death of the subject, lives that are considered interesting enough to be written and read about are often closely related to a paradigmatic shift, a revolution of one sort or another. Whether the individuals are the indispensable agents of such revolutionary moments, or simply happened to be in the right place at the right moment, is a sensitive case in point. Furthermore, in the ‘structure’ of a human life – this dated word should be understood in the broadest possible sense of what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) – time is heterogeneous: there are ‘turning points’, or moments of higher intensity, which are interesting to study as such, as well as for their two-way impact on individual lives and their contexts, but also for their incidence on the composition of biographies. Under the influence of the cinema, some modern biographies focus on particularly significant moments or periods in the lives they relate. Such ‘partial’ biographies are one instance of formal innovation in a genre that is often criticized for its conventionality, yet there have been other revolutionary experiments in biography, as for example Ruth Scurr’s recent John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015), written out like a diary, in the first-person singular. This seminar will welcome contributions proposing theoretical reflections or case studies in history, literature and cinema, on one or the other of these three heads: how individual lives relate to historical or paradigmatic revolutions, the nature and impact of ‘turning points’ in human lives, or innovations in the evolution of biography as a genre. The article versions of the presentations will afterwards be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal with the permission of their authors.

Conveners: Joanny Moulin Joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr et Patrick Di Mascio patrick.dimascio@univ-amu.fr

PROGRAMME

Workshop I : Thursday 7 June, 15.30-18.30.

15.30

María-Teresa DEL-OLMO-IBÁÑEZ

Université d’Alicante, Humanismo Europa

Gregorio Marañón’s ‘Relevant Event’ in the Pedagogical Development of Human Beings and Humankind

Gregorio Marañón defines the ‘relevant event’ as one which implies a transformation or change in the life trajectory of the biographical subject. He elaborates a concept of the relationship between man and humanity on a Diltheyan basis. He establishes a similarity between the personal evolutionary process and the history of man. And he talks about ‘panic of instinct’ as another of his main themes concerning that: as much for the individual life as in the history of the human being, Marañón maintains that there are moments in which the advent of decisive changes in his trajectory is felt. These premonitions are the cause of great crises caused by panic and insecurity. He distinguishes three events that they have been preceded by this instinctive terror in humanity: the birth of Christ, the discovery of America and another unidentified terror that would correspond to the time when religious preoccupation has ceased to be so.

16.00

Floriane REVIRON-PIEGAY

Université de Saint-Étienne, CELEC (EA 3069)

Lytton Strachey, André Maurois and the New Biography: French evolution versus English revolution?

The purpose of this presentation is to assess André Maurois’s contribution to the Revolution of the New Biography and more precisely Lytton Strachey’s influence on Maurois. André Maurois prefaced the French translation of Eminent Victorians and commented on Strachey’s breakthrough in biography at length in Aspects of Biography or in Prophets and Poets. An anglophile and English-speaking man, Maurois was to spread Strachey’s ideas about biography in fictional biographies of his own (Ariel or the Life of Shelley, Disraeli, Byron Prometheus: The Life of Balzac), and in theoretical essays. Keeping in mind the text written by Harold Bloom upon The Anxiety of Influence, it is the extent of this “influence” that we would like to analyse by looking at the way these texts were written and spread, interpreted and received both in France and in Great-Britain.

16.30

DISCUSSION

17.00

Craig HOWES

University of Hawai’i, Center for Biographical Research (CBR)

How Soon Can A Point Turn? Childhood, Psychoanalysis, and Biography

One of the commonplaces of the history of biography is that psychoanalysis marks a turning point in its practice. Freud himself made this claim; Strachey and Nicolson were early acolytes of sorts; Erikson, Edel, Sartre, and others became its heirs and its theorists; and in 2007, Nigel Hamilton refers to Freud’s claim as “a historic declaration.”  This paper evaluates how this revolution has influenced the representation of turning points in lives. One of the major impacts of psychoanalysis on biography was its insistence on how early, profoundly, and irrevocably a life can turn. This led biographers to examine the subject’s childhood far more closely, and frequently to speculate about turning points that “must” have happened to explain the life’s later course. But to what extent do recent biographies sustain, call into question, or ignore the imperative to locate turning points in the earliest years of a life—and more specifically, in lives that are themselves seen as turning points in the history of science and technology?

17.30

Guillaume WAGNER

Université de Strasbourg, Centre de recherches en philosophie allemande et contemporaine (CREPHAC, EA 2326)

Vies et enjeux collectifs

Nous proposons d’interroger la présupposition d’une dichotomie entre «vie révolutionnaire » et « vie ordinaire », de même entre « tournant » historique ou « moments de haute intensité » et « vies humaines ». Car ce ne sont pas les « tournants » qui « font » les vies humaines. Ces dernières, même passives, s’agrègent en énergies collectives au point de bouleverser des formes d’organisation sociale. Les « tournants » relèvent de forces ou d’énergies collectives plus ou moins considérables se cristallisant autour de circonstances porteuses d’enjeux singuliers. Cela nous amène également à interroger « l’événement historique » comme tel. Nous nous appuierons sur un corpus d’ouvrages pour une étude comparative

18.00

DISCUSSION

Workshop II : Friday 8 June, 9.00-10.30.

9.00

Ahmed GALAL

Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Centre de recherche CERMOM

Vie révolutionnaire ou révolution d’une vie ? Étude de l’autobiographie al-awra 2.0 de l’Égyptien Waël Ghonim

Sorti d’abord en anglais chez HMH Books à Boston, l’ouvrage paraît en arabe dix jours plus tard chez Dār al-Šurūq au Caire. Né en 1980 au Caire, cyberactiviste égyptien, Waël Ghonim est devenu la figure de proue de la révolution égyptienne de 2011. Directeur marketing de Google Moyen-Orient à Dubaï, il crée anonymement une page Facebook Kulunā Ḫālid Saʿīd (Nous sommes tous Khalid Saïd) en hommage à une victime des violences policières. Fort de la voix de ses 350 000 membres, l’auteur diffuse sur cette page le premier appel à un soulèvement le 25 janvier 2011. Pourquoi Waël Ghonim a-t-il pris la plume ? Notre intervention tentera d’y répondre en s’articulant autour de trois motivations issues de notre lecture et analyse : raconter l’histoire de sa propre métamorphose de l’indifférence politique à l’implication révolutionnaire, réfuter son statut de « héros », et s’expliquer au sujet de quelques doutes sur la sincérité de son militantisme et de ses démarches.

9.30

Hans RENDERS

Université de Groningue, Biography Institute

Theo van Doesburg and his revolution with De Stijl 1917-1932

About the De Stijl-movement and the magazine of the same name has been published a lot, even last year when the centenary of its creation in 1917, a month after the Bolshevist Octotober revolution in Russia, received unprecedented attention in the Netherlands, and in the rest of the world. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of De Stijl, propagated De Nieuwe Beelding or neo-plasticism, which represented an abstract geometric language. Rarely, however, has the relationship been established between this new visual language and the striving for the de-individualization of De Stijl. Even though Theo van Doesburg felt that politics was ‘on-modern’, the political implications of De Stijl can not be denied. In this paper, it becomes clear when and by what personal circumstances Van Doesburg unleashed a revolution in the arts.

10.00

David VELTMAN

Université de Groningue, Biography Institute

Carry On Quietly: the Flemish avant-garde remembers its revolutionary days

During the First World War, many modernist artists in Flanders were collaborating with the German occupier. Victor Servranckx, Felix de Boeck and Prosper de Troyer, for example, worked together at the activist artist’s society of Doe Stil Voort [Carry On Quietly], funded by the Germans. They envisaged a revolution leading to a ‘New World’, based upon the rational choices and clear language that they used in their abstract art. The return of heavily wounded soldiers from the Flemish battlefields could be seen as a turning point in De Boeck’s life. His background of collaboration with the Germans did not function anymore as a way to position himself as belonging to the former activist group. Abstract art was considered suspect during the Second World War: the ‘New World’ revolution did not succeed. What does this lack of revolutionary spirit say about the way the Flemish avant-garde saw its own history?

10.30

DISCUSSION

Workshop III : Saturday 9 June, 9.00-10.30.

 

9.00

Olivier FRAYSSÉ

Sorbonne Université, Faculté des Lettres, Histoire et dynamique des espaces anglophones (HDEA, EA 4086)

Was Abraham Lincoln a revolutionist?

This paper will explore one of the issues that have divided Lincoln scholars: was president Lincoln a conservative or a revolutionist? The Lincoln presidency is justly famous for the abolition of slavery, which led several historians, from Charles A. Beard to James McPherson, to label the Civil War “a second American Revolution”. If it really was, then was Lincoln an enthusiastic or a reluctant revolutionist? The question expands when considering the significant changes brought about by the Lincoln presidency in the realms of federal power and executive privilege, the financial organization and economic policies of the nation, and becomes trickier when the issue of race relations is squarely addressed. What were the interpretative hypotheses that led biographers to give conflicting answers to these questions?

9.30

Pascale MONTRÉSOR-TIMPESTA

Université de la Réunion, Laboratoire de recherche sur les espaces Créoles francophones (LCF-EA4549).

La « démonumentalisation » de Toussaint Louverture

La geste de Toussaint Louverture constitue le premier « tournant décolonial » (Nelson Maldonado‑Torres) qui édifie l’homme noir en tant que « sujet capable » (Ricoeur). Les biographies de Schoelcher, de Césaire, de Pluchon et de Foix consacrent le personnage historique. La pièce de Lamartine Toussaint Louverture et celle de Glissant Monsieur Toussaint, le roman historique de Métellus Toussaint Louverture, le Précurseur et le roman fantastique de Pasquet La mort de Toussaint Louverture contribuent, au contraire, à sa « démonumentalisation » (Claudie Bernard) en montrant les fêlures de sa pétrification afin de l’humaniser. Mais, lors de la diffusion du téléfilm Toussaint Louverture, cette pratique stupéfie ses apologistes. Les adaptations biographiques doivent-elles se contenter de monumentaliser sa geste ou, au contraire, de la « démonumentaliser » afin d’interroger « la possession coloniale » (Laurent Dubreuil) qui conditionne toujours la perception du lecteur ou du téléspectateur sur les interrelations raciales ?

10.00

QUESTIONS

Workshop IV : Saturday 9 June, 11.00-12.30.

 

11.00

Karima THOMAS

Institut Universitaire de Technologie d’Angers, CIRPaLL (Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche sur les patrimoines en lettres et langues, UPRES EA 7457)

The Invention of Angela Carter: The Danger of Canonizing an Iconoclastic Author

Angela Carter’s life and writing are inextricably linked to the feminist and the countercultural movements of the 1960’s. In “Notes from The front Line” Carter confirms the role of the sixties in shaping her identity and her writing. Carter’s fiction and essays insist on the social and discursive construction of the identity. Her feminist and countercultural engagements foreground her representation of the subject as invention. This paper will examine the extent to which Edmund Gordon’s biography captures the dialogue between the author and the feminist  and countercultural dynamics of her times and reflects the iconoclastic attitude of the author. Other related questions concern the composition of the biography itself: does the biography respect the demythologizing business in which the author was engaged or does it contribute into mythologizing the author like many obituaries did soon after Carter’s death? To what extent is the biography in keeping with the revolutionary spirit and style of the author?

11.30

Angel CLEMENTE ESCOBAR

Université Lille, Centre d’Études en Civilisation, Langues et Lettres Étrangères(CECILLE, EA4074)

Révolution dans la révolution. Le Mai 68 de Lawrence Ferlinghetti

L’écrivain nord-américain Lawrence Ferlinghetti, appartenant à la Beat Generation, a eu l’une de ces vies qu’on peut appeler révolutionnaires, hors des chemins préétablis. Son éducation sentimentale et littéraire au Greenwich Village, l’activité picturale parallèle à l’écriture ou son esprit subversive, trouvent dans ses œuvres un vrai reflet. Concrètement, son deuxième roman, intitulé Love in the days of rage et publié en 1988, recueille beaucoup de ces éléments et les introduit dans le contexte de l’insurrection universitaire et ouvrière de Mai 68. Le roman nous présente un personnage controversé, Julian Mendes, dont la définition plus réussie est l’apparent paradoxe être banquier et anarchiste en même temps, comme l’auteur lui-même reconnaît dans son dévouement, débiteur du personnage dans l’histoire de Fernando Pessoa O banqueiro anarchiste. Son argument est l’histoire de leur rencontre et de la naissance de l’amour entre lui et une peintre américaine appelée Annie au printemps parisien, duquel ils participent activement.

12.00

Taïna TUHKUNEN

Université d’Angers, 3L.AM-UPRES EA 4335

Radical life-writing in process on screen: Howl (Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2010) and I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Rarely endowed with revolutionary potential, the biopic (“biographical moving picture”) has often been regarded as a marginal or “malign” cinematographic sub/genre. However, despite persisting narrative and typological patterns in the filmic rewriting of the lives of “larger-than-life characters”, some of these immensely popular films foreground the radical, to a large extent still unexplored capacity of the biopic to reconstruct an exceptional character in film. This paper proposes a brief exploration of the innovative portrayals of Allen Ginsberg in Howl (Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2010) and Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007). After contrasting these films inspired by the life of a well-known American poet and an even better-known singer-poet with more classic poet biopics, we shall see to what extent the two films seek to challenge the canonic retelling of a life. Of particular interest is the way the filmmakers draw on multiple sources during their filmic attempt to recreate an emblematic individual capable of incarnating an entire era.

12.30

DISCUSSION

Anna María Caballé

Anna María Caballé
Unidad de Estudios Biográficos
(Universitat de Barcelona)
23 Mars 2018
14h00-16h00    (Salle 2.41)
Maison de la Recherche
Site Schuman
Aix Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France

 

Seminar: TRANSNATIONAL BIOGRAPHY IN EUROPE, 29.08-02.09.18 (ESSE2018, Brno).

 

TRANSNATIONAL BIOGRAPHY IN EUROPE
SEMINAR S57

14th ESSE Conference
Brno 2018
29 August – 2 September 2018

Conveners :

Abstract:

In the nineteenth century especially, biography has played an important literary and cultural part in the building of the national identities of the European nation states. Today, on the contrary, there is a discernible interest in biographies of figures of international significance – artists, scientists, politicians, etc. Such transnational biographies can be lives of historical personages belonging to linguistic and cultural areas different from the biographers’ and the readers’, or simply biographies highlighting the transnational connections and interactions of a person. This seminar, backed by the Biography Society network, would focus more particularly on biographies that forge and foreground transnational communities, which may be cosmopolitan, humanist, linguistic, religious, political, etc. Among related issues, this poses the question of the translatability of biography, not so much in terms of language as of cultural transference, for an individual’s life is bound to be written differently, depending on its reading community. The readability of a biography beyond the linguistic and cultural community in which it was originally written and published depends very much on the transnational relevance of the person whose life it relates. Some biographies focus on particular go-between figures whose lives are remarkable for the linkage they establish and cultivate between different national agents of cultural transference. Others present the lives of personages of universal relevance. There seems to be a “world biography” category of the genre, in the sense of Auerbach’s Weltliteratur, which poses the question of the place and impact of biography in global studies. It is debatable whether transnational biographies can perceptibly contribute to building a sense of cultural belonging to one region of the world, like the European Community for instance, or whether today this has become an epiphenomenon of cultural globalization. This seminar on transnational biographies would welcome proposals for contributions offering general reflections on this topic, as well as related case studies.

List of Participants  and Titles (Abstracts below):

  1. BADUR, Ayșe Köse, Bogazici University Istanbul, Turkey – Mehmed Cavid Bey; Between Empire and Nation-State
  2. BERNÁD, Ágoston Zénó, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien, Austria – Writing Transnational Biographies in Central Europe – The Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815–1950 (ÖBL)
  3. DEL-OLMO-IBÁÑEZ, María-Teresa, University of Alicante, Spain – Concept and pedagogy of exile in Gregorio Marañón
  4. DUBKOVA, Maria, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia – Biography of place in Peter Ackroyd
  5. EL YAMANI, Mohamed Saad Eddine, Université Paris 3, France – State of biography in the Arab world
  6. FONTANALS, David, University of Barcelona, Spain – Zweig’s biographies and his commitment to a frontierless and cosmopolitan Europe
  7. KAISER, Maximilian and PeterRUMPOLT, Austrian Academy of Sciences Vienna, Austria  – Tracing transnationality through a biographical dictionary: the case of the Austrian  Biographical Dictionary
  8. KELLER, Thomas, Aix-Marseille Université, France – Transcultural integrity; how to write a non-identitarian biography
  9. MANZARI, Francesca, Aix-Marseille Université, France Writing The Critical Lives of Michel Foucault
  10. MATUS, Adrian, European University Institute Florence, Italy – On Both Sides of the “Nylon Courtain”: Rudi Dutschke in Hungary
  11. McVEIGH, Jane, University of Roehampton, United Kingdom – We Tell Stories About Ourselves and Others
  12. MIOCHE, Philippe, Aix-Marseille Université, France – Revisiting the biographies of Jean Monnet
  13. MOULIN, Joanny, Aix-Marseille Université / Institut Universitaire de France, France – Transnational Artists’ Lives Are a Rare Species
  14. RENSEN, Marleen, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Transnational approaches to artists’ biographies, 1900-1945
  15. SCHLÖGL, Matthias ,Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities – Austrian Academy of Sciences – A Prosopographical Information System
  16. SZUREK, Agnieszka, University of Warsaw, Poland – Transnationality and multiethnicity in local amateur biographies from Warsaw suburban region

Abstracts

First Name, Surname: Title of the Presentation, Text of the abstract

  1. Ayșe Köse BADUR: Mehmed Cavid Bey; Between Empire and Nation-State

This is the story of Mehmed Cavid Bey (1875, Thessaloniki-1926, Ankara). He was graduated from the School of Administrative Sciences in Istanbul and specialized in the field of economy. He was the Minister of Finance of the Ottoman Empire between 1908 and 1918. Cavid Bey was a member of Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) accomplished the declaration of the Second Constitutionalist Period. As a Member of Parliament as of 1908, his focus was economic regulation and conducting of foreign economic relations. He resigned from his job as Minister of Finance when the Ottoman Empire decided to enter the Great War. In 1919, he went into exile and came back to Turkey in 1922. He was executed in 1926. Cavid Bey is coming from a Thessalonian “Donme” family, descendants of Jews converted to Islam. He was a Freemason like many of the Unionists. He adopted a cosmopolitan and liberal worldview. The members of CUP and the leaders of the War of Independence -again mostly members of CUP- belonged to the same generation who vigorously advocated for Enlightenment values and maintained modern lifestyles. The underlying reason that determined the end of Cavid Bey’s life was his Unionist disposition which was perceived as a threat in the eyes of the founders of Republic. Cavid Bey was closely attached to his Unionist identity until his last day, although he oftentimes had disagreements with the party, even regarding his personal identity. It is possible to call Cavid Bey as a “Civil Unionist” for he is a modern statesman and a Unionist.

  1. Ágoston Zénó BERNÁD: Writing Transnational Biographies in Central Europe – The Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815–1950 (ÖBL)

Founded in 1946 and published since 1954, the ÖBL covers not only the territory of present-day Austria, but the entire Habsburg empire, thus providing an image of Central European culture between 1815 and 1950. The not yet completed reference work, which is being elaborated by an international collective of authors from all the successor states of the Donaumonarchie, today contains about 20,000 biographies. The dictionary went through several stages of digitization. Within the APIS project, started 2015, the semi-structured biographical datasets have been integrated into a web application and prepared and processed for biographical-historical research. The presentation positions the ÖBL within the transnational space and investigates this aspect on the basis of selected entries from the ÖBL, which are juxtaposed with those from biographical dictionaries of the successor states. It is examined whether national narratives can be overcome in a transnational biographical textspace.

  1. María-Teresa DEL-OLMO-IBÁÑEZ: Concept and pedagogy of exile in Gregorio Marañón

Gregorio Marañón has been defined as a ‘total biographer’ (del-Olmo-Ibáñez, 2015). The complexity, breadth and completeness of his biographical work make it a material that includes practically all the possible shades of study. In relation to the approach on ‘biographical transnationalities in Europe’, the Spanish author also appears as a singularity. The autobiographical element is essential in his work and concretely the subject of exile of paramount importance. The impact of his own exile in France during the Spanish Civil War led him to a recurrent presence of this issue in his essays and in his biographed characters. He also establishes an interesting association between exile and translation work, on the one hand, which leads him to a theoretical reflection on this activity in which he contrasts translation and creation, on the other. For the study that we propose here, we define the following lines of analysis of Marañón’s work: the idea of exile and banishment, the difference between voluntary and forced exile, Spanish exilees that he is dealing with, the relationship between the Spanish exilees and France, his works on exile, the effect of exile on scientific research in Spain. The study perspective will be from a generic and global point of view, together with an analysis of his pedagogical and formative interpretation of the absence of the fatherland in his biographed characters.

  1. Maria DUBKOVA: Biography of place in Peter Ackroyd

Biography has always been and might continue to remain one of the crucial genres in literature. It serves as a mirror for self-reflexion and as a so-called impression of culture at a given period of time. In this paper I am going to demonstrate how Peter Ackroyd in his books goes even further and transforms this into a new kind of narrative. Traditionally biography is associated with a certain individual, but he blurs the boundaries between traditional biography and cultural studies. Ackroyd combines features of biography, cultural study and fiction to create what he calls the biography of place or geobiography. The first book in the series was “London: the Biography” (2000), then came “Thames: Sacred River” (2007) and “Venice: Pure City” (2009). I believe it might be considered as a significant trend in modern literature, since Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, uses the similar technique in his “Istanbul: Memories and the City” (2003). The place now becomes the sum of all activities in it.  This type of biography also meets the need in a new type of urban description. Now the group of people is in the focus of attention, not an individual. What Ackroyd shows is the type of symbiosis between place and its inhabitants.

  1. Mohamed Saad Eddine EL YAMANI: State of biography in the Arab world

Before the modern period, the biography enjoyed a high prestige in the Arab-Muslim world; it had even given birth to a very popular sub-genre: the biographical dictionaries, which could relate to kings, poets, doctors, judges, etc. Today, the “scientific” biography seems to be in a very bad situation in the literary field. What are the causes behind this state of affairs? This is what we will try to discuss in the first part of this article. The politico-economic situation thus seems to us a decisive element: it has repercussions on an editorial field that is bloodless and on a reduced readership. Paradoxically, the biographical novel can appear as a compromise. If it deals with characters who really existed, its freedom allows it to highlight some problems of Arab societies – despotism, lack of freedom, etc. – and reach a wider audience. This is the point we will discuss in the second part of our intervention, highlighting some famous examples.

  1. David FONTANALS: Zweig’s biographies and his commitment to a frontierless and cosmopolitan Europe

In his “super-personal autobiography”  Die Welt von Gestern (1942) —and through the text’s flaws, inclusions and omissions— Stefan Zweig invites the reader to think in terms of a very specific idea of world, that is to say, in terms of a project for a frontierless and cosmopolitan Europe that is defined by the notions of freedom, humanism, tolerance, pacifism, common understanding, empathy and the experience of the postnational. Thus, Zweig makes a life purpose out of his Weltanschauung and, as he admits in a short autobiographical sketch published in New York in 1936, he feels it “to be [his] moral duty to create in one direction only, that one which would help our time to progress […], further[ing] the unification of humanity and increas[ing] the mutual understanding of peoples and nations” . Taking these ideas into account, this paper will explore how Zweig’s idea of the world, his Weltanschauung, informs the way he approaches, chooses and interacts with the subjects of his biographies. I will defend the idea that Zweig uses the biographical genre as a means to promote a transnational community, as a tool to create a genealogy of figures that come to represent and embody a certain idea of Europe. More specifically, the portraits of Émile Verhaeren, Romain Rolland, Erasmus, Castellio, and Montaigne —which mirror Zweig’s own projected (“transferred”, Freud) self— must be read against Zweig’s commitment to his “imagined” transnational community.

  1. Maximilian KAISER & Peter RUMPOLT, Tracing transnationality through a biographical dictionary: the case of the Austrian  Biographical Dictionary

In this presentation, we want to show how transnationality can be traced through a biographical dictionary with methods of the digital humanities. The starting point of this case study is the corpus of 18.000 biographical articles of the ‘Austrian Biographical Dictionary. 1815–1950’. This set of biographies consists of persons born, having lived or acted in Austria or in the crown lands of the Habsburg Monarchy with various professional backgrounds, such as artists, lawyers, physicians or politicians. Besides the fundamental facts like place of birth, date of birth etc. which is given in the metadata of each biography, the main text offers a wide range of biographical information. We assume that international spatial mobility (including individual migration processes) is one of the necessary prerequisites which make biographies transnational. Within the research project ‘The Austrian Prosopographical Information System (APIS)’ computer-linguistic methods are used to retrieve and structure information about the education and career paths of the depicted personalities. Biographical building blocks which are used to describe the relations to places and institutions are processed within a virtual research environment. On this basis, groups of people with biographies that can be characterized as transnational can be identified through visualizing networks and maps.

  1. Thomas KELLER: Transcultural integrity; how to write a non-identitarian biography

I distinguish four levels: – the biography as a genre that takes into account transculturality: the cases of persons living and transmitting between two or several cultures (ruptures, non-linearity, mixity), multiplication of their biographers and languages   – the scripts, the cultural archives structuring the cross-border itineries: circular story (Ulysse, aventiure); exile without return, transplantation (Ovid), non-identitarian stories  (Traven, Cravan, Greve…) – the inner narration informing about ruptures, discontinuious periods of life, the multiplication of the public   – to lead a life that weaves a transculturel tissue and expresses a pre-existing transcultural habitus; exotic and dandyesk elements, cultivating the strange.  Cases of figures :   1. Biographies of mediators French mediators informing about Germany (Simone Balayé: Mme de Staël, Sabine Appel : Mme de Staël) German mediators informing about France; Friedrich Sieburg : Gott in Frankreich? (France lovable and retardet); biographies of Sieburg about Robbespierre and Chateaubriand Barbara Lambauer : Friedrich Sieburg; Margot Taureck :  Friedrich Sieburg The mediating persons create a discourse and an image of the other, an immobile and essentialist script    2. Biographies of “birds of paradise”,to  multiply the rôles, to create confusion  Julius Meier-Graefe, Felix Paul Greve, Elsa von Loringhoven, Franz Jung,  Klaus Martens : Greve/Grove Fritz Mierau : Franz Jung The biography emphasizes the plural strategies: to camouflage, to deceive, to betray, to use mimicry  3. Biographies marked by the change of the culture and/or of the system Skillful incorrect five zigers: Friedrich Sieburg, Gerhard Heller (during the German occupation in Paris) Persons in exile with integrity: Bernard Groethuysen, Helmuth Plessner  Klaus Grosse-Kracht : Groethuysen; Carola Dietze : Plessner  The biography detects the traps and ambiguities: describing false continuity or how to avoid conspicuity  4. Biographies stressing on strangeness or the absence of strangeness (body, mask)  – The other culture becomes invisible, imperceptible, perfect code-switching and bi-linguism   Daniel Cohn-Bendit (German and French biographies) – The other culture “disturbs”: accent, stylistique lapses, deviant body language  Michael Werner: Heinrich Heine Desideratum : anthropology of the strange “inter/transbody.”

  1. Francesca MANZARI: Writing The Critical Lives of Michel Foucault

David Macey Lives of Michel Foucault is a transnational multi-biography of “the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War II”. With the cooperation of Daniel Defert, Foucault’s former lover, David Macey narrates the “critical” lives of a French philosopher who became extremely famous in the USA in the second half of the 20th century, trying to penetrate the paradox of a philosophy which increasingly deals with the connection between life and work and a figure of a thinker who keeps secret every detail of his own life. Macey’s biography fulfills Foucault’s dream of a life shaped by a way of thinking. The text is a long attempt at intertwining the philosopher’s works and the episodes of his life. It is somehow fragmented and assembled at once, giving place to philosophy in life and to life in philosophy. We will try to answer the following questions: How the English point of view and English language become a way of looking at Foucault’s lives? How are the American and the English way of reading Foucault at stake in Macey’s biography? How is Foucault’s life related to the other French thinkers (Lacan, Fanon) who became the objet of David Macey’s books?

  1. Adrian MATUS: On Both Sides of the “Nylon Courtain”: Rudi Dutschke in Hungary

The year 1968 witnessed many youth movements, at both international and transnational levels. In West Germany, a key-figure was Rudi Dutschke, the spokesperson of the German Student Movement. However, his activity was not limited to German Federal Republic. Because during his youth he lived in East Germany, one of his particular intellectual interest was the Central European Communist bloc. For instance, in 1966 he visited Hungary and met the local intelligentsia from Budapest.  A segment of the Hungarian intelligentsia was highly interested in revising ideas about Marxism, through its different political expressions: Maoism, Gramscism or New Leftism. One of them was Budapest School, a group made of few philosophers who distinguished themselves from the Hungarian Party Marxism and adapted the New Left ideas starting from the early 1960s. Therefore, when Rudi Dutschke visited Budapest, he met Revai Gabor, another philosopher from this small network. The two intellectuals managed to maintain a dialogue until 1971, through letters that were passed through various East German connections. My interest is to understand the role of Rudi Dutchke, a former East German who moved to West Germany and then came to Hungary to define the later dissident movement. My main sources will be the correspondence between the two, but as well as Radio Free Europe Archival Material from Open Society Foundation in Budapest.

  1. Jane McVEIGH: We Tell Stories About Ourselves and Others

In Collaboration with British Literary Biography: Haunting Conversations (Palgrave 2017) offers a comparative reading of biography and considers the nature of re-creative narrative in life-writing. This book is one reader’s conversation with the biographies she has read and the lives they describe, as well as actual conversations that took place in 2016 with some biographers. It argues that our conversations with the life-writing we encounter goes on to haunt our future reading and writing and becomes part of the way that we understand both the past and the present. We all tell stories about our own lives and those of others, but the story may have a slightly different focus or emphasis depending on who is telling it, who they are speaking to, when the events discussed took place, and how the story is told. As part of this process of storytelling, biographers ask questions about the identity of ourselves and others and create a form of countersignature, one that must be faithful to the facts but re-creates something that is unique, of its moment, and open to more reimagining. Also, in writing about another person, or group of people, they offer a form of remembrance that prolongs or re-ignites a person’s impact on the world. A biographer is an artist on oath who re-creates a story based on the facts of a life or lives.

  1. Philippe MIOCHE: Revisiting the biographies of Jean Monnet

Jean Monnet (1888 – 1979), the first “citizen of Europe”, “The first statesman of Interdependence” (François Duchêne), has been the subject of several biographies. Recent work allows us to discuss certain stages of his life and above all, the memory of Jean Monnet is the subject of a recurrent debate in connection with the process of European construction. Actor of the First and Second World War, Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations, promoter of the ECSC and the European construction, he is clearly an international and European character, “transnational”. Author of the plan that bears his name at the Liberation (Plan Monnet 1946 – 1952), inspirer of the declaration of Robert Schuman (9 May 1950), he is also a French national actor and as such he entered the Pantheon, “to great men, the grateful homeland “, in 1988. It is at the same time a European and international cause and, in France, a national cause. How to cross these biographical readings in Brussels and Paris? The communication concerns the memory of Jean Monnet through uses of his biography. How did the uses of the biography nourish a “myth” of Jean Monnet? Between the biographers who sometimes contribute to the legend, the European Commission in search of paternity, the chroniclers who periodically announce the second death of Jean Monnet and his method, the French politicians who claim the memory of man. The biography and the memory of Jean Monnet, says “the inspirer”, are omnipresent.

  1. Joanny MOULIN: Transnational Artists’ Lives Are a Rare Species

This paper argues that in fact ‘Transnational Perspectives on the Writing of Artists’ Lives’ are very much a niche market. To remain focused on my particular field of expertise, the scope of this paper would limit itself to biographies of foreign artists, leaving aside the issue of ‘biofictions’, which is a slightly different subject. A study of the prize-winning biographies published in the UK, the USA, and France since the 1990s — and these are the cultural areas and the period to which I shall circumscribe my examples — shows that they are few and far between. Such transnational subjects are most often artists of international fame, like Van Gogh, Matisse, Joyce, Wharton, etc. In the rare cases when they are not, they are figures singled out as meaningful for a specific reading community: feminist role models, personages of special interest to national communities of foreign origin, etc. The paper will postulate on the causes of this state of things, which incidentally raises the question of a supranational canon of artists’ figures, while seeking to determine the specificity of biography on this head as compared to other genres.

  1. Marleen RENSEN: Transnational approaches to artists’ biographies, 1900-1945

In this paper I will explore the potential of transnational approaches for biography studies. I will focus on a network of 20th C writers who all published popular biographies of artists, past and present, from countries other than their own. For example, Emile Verhaeren wrote the life of Rembrandt (1903); Stefan Zweig portrayed Emile Verhaeren (1910) and Romain Rolland (1921); Rolland devoted a biographical study to Beethoven and Klaus Mann published a biography of André Gide (1943). Challenging the nationalist appropriations of artists as icons of the nation, they situate their subjects in a broader European context and assume a European dimension in their art. Studying these artists’ biographies in a transnational context brings to light the multiple, often conflicting identities attributed to the ‘European artist’. A transnational perspective, moreover, reveals Europe as a zone of cross-cultural traffic in which these biographies circulate and travel from one context to another. The authors read each other’s work and engaged with it creatively, in their own biographical studies as well as in their self-representations. The use of similar topics and tropes give evidence of a shared practice of writing artists’ lives which continues to influence our own understanding of European culture and identity.

  1. Matthias SCHLÖGL, APIS – A Prosopographical Information System

The Austrian Biographic Dictionary (ÖBL) can be seen as a transnational dictionary in two ways. On the one hand the spatial requirement for people to be added to the lexicon is restricted to the former Austrian empire. From today’s perspective, the lexicon is therefore transnational in its very nature. On the other hand people with an interesting – and therefore very often transnational – life have been picked for the lexicon. ÖBL therefore allows for a glimpse into the lives of a transnational elite rooted in central-eastern Europe of the late 18th, 19th and early 20th century. To utilize the full (quantitative) potential of the Lexicon the biographic articles need to be semantically annotated. The presentation highlights the technical part of the APIS project. We developed a Virtual Research Environment [2] that not only allows to skim through the data and visualize it, but actually work on it. The VRE utilizes the possibilities of the Linked Open Data Cloud (LOD) to allow researchers to easily and efficiently annotate biographies in a web-based system. While manually annotating is useful for projects dealing with small subsets of biographies, we use Natural Language Processing and deep learning techniques to extract entities and semantic relations from the whole corpus [3]. We will showcase these technologies and discuss perspectives and limitations for the work on transnational biographies.

  1. Agnieszka SZUREK: Transnationality and multiethnicity in local amateur biographies from Warsaw suburban region

Biographies are extremely popular in local literature. Noncommercial editorial presses or local institutions in small towns publish biographies od locally famous persons as well as stories about people who were born in small, provincial towns but later gained worldwide fame. In recent years even in small suburban communities there is a growing interest in biographies in which various cultures, languages and religions are crossing and entwining with each other – from Jews, Russians and Germans living in towns such as Grodzisk to Englishmen or Scandinavians building villas in new suburbans residential areas. The aim of this paper is to explore what rhetorical strategies are used in such biographies – what is amplified and embellished and what is intentionally omitted or left vague and how a ‘community accepted’ version is negotiated and created. In my attempt to answer these questions I will use the methods of rhetorical criticism.

Direct link to the ESSE Conference internet site

Yannick Gouchan – La jeune fille et la mort: la vie graphique d’Elizabeth Siddal, 23.02.18

Séminaire “Biographie”

 

The Biography Society Seminar welcomes / prochaine séance du séminaire “biographie”:

 

Yannick Gouchan    
(Aix Marseille Univ, CAER, Aix-en-Provence, France)

La jeune fille et la mort :

la vie graphique d’Elizabeth Siddal, muse de la PRB

(Elizabeth de Marco Tagliapietra).

 

 

Vendredi 23 février 2018
Maison de la Recherche, Aix Marseille Université, Campus Schuman, Aix-en-Provence.
à 14h, salle 2.44

 

Yannick Gouchan  est Professeur de littérature et civilisation italiennes contemporaines à Aix Marseille Université. / Yannick Gouchan is Professor of contemporary Italian literature and Italian studies at Aix Marseille Université.

Page 3 of 8

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén