Theories of American Autobiography/Theorizing American Autobiography

Workshop F: seminar room P109a (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Philipp Löffler (Heidelberg), Stefanie Schäfer (Jena)

 

1. Larissa Bendel (Hamburg), "A Growing Body of Works about Memory, History, and the Self: Life Writing by Women of the Beat Generation"

2. Annabella Fick (Würzburg), "The Quintessential American: Conrad Hilton in his Autobiography Be My Guest"

3. Rüdiger Heinze (Braunschweig), "Almost Autobiographical – (Non)Fictionality in Contemporary Migration Narratives"

4. Kathy-Ann Tan (Tübingen), "Creating Dangerously: Writing, Exile and Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat's and Dany Laferrière's Haitian Memoirs"

5. Kathleen Loock (Göttingen), "From Clumsy Greenhorn to Joking Yankee: Strategic Humor in Immigrant Autobiographies"

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Contact:

Dr. Larissa Bendel
LariBendel@web.de

Annabella Fick, M.A.
annabella.fick@uni-wuerzburg.de

JProf. Dr. Rüdiger Heinze
r.heinze@tu-braunschweig.de

Dr. Kathy-Ann Tan
kathy-ann.tan@uni-tuebingen.de

Kathleen Loock, M.A.
Kathleen.Loock@phil.uni-goettingen.de

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What makes autobiography ‘American’? How do Americans make themselves out as autobiographers? As any layperson can tell from the organization of US book stores, the popularity of the genre persists. Critics observe that, in America, autobiography also represents an industry (Robert F. Sayre) and that “the master-narrative of ‘Americanization’” is deeply ingrained in the everyday (Rob Wilson). Yet while there seems no doubt about the significance of autobiography in American culture since the late 18th century, we are still lacking comprehensive theories to explain both the multiple forms and functions of the genre and their social-historical specificity. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography may be light years away from Andre Agassi’s, using different formal strategies and addressing other reader communities. But both books qualify as autobiographies and they do so by supposedly highlighting a unique notion of ‘Americanness’.
This workshop pursues a double aim: on the one hand, we invite contributions about theories of American autobiography from a literary and cultural studies perspective; on the other hand, we also want to theorize American autobiographies, i.e. examine publications through the ages and investigate the nexus between self-narration and American cultural identity. Following James Olney’s observation that the genre undergoes a shift of focus from the ‘self’ towards the ‘telling’, contributions may address the ‘why tell’ and ‘how tell’ question in autobiography, looking at culturally specific telling strategies, metanarrative commentary, or intertextual and intergeneric cross-references to classical examples of the genre, or culturally available plots, like the coming of age narrative. Furthermore, we are interested in the visual and textual presentation of autobiographies, cover designs and blurbs, table of contents, prologues and other extratextual markers that may inscribe the text into an ‘American’ tradition. Particularly in view of its immanent requirement of “declaring both cultural allegiance and independence” (Jerome Bruner), we have to examine how the genre of autobiography lends itself to the imaginary conception of ‘Americanness’. Finally, we would like to look chronologically at the development of the American autobiography, trying to explain the unbroken success-story of the genre despite its shifting historical contexts of production and reception.

Contributions therefore may address, but of course are not limited to the following themes:

• textual and extratextual strategies of autobiographical representation
• strategies of authentication and self-presentation in autobiographies
• interactions between ‘Americanness’ and other cultural identities
• historical change of autobiographical narrative and strategies of representation