Tag: seminar

 

TRANSNATIONAL BIOGRAPHY IN EUROPE
SEMINAR S57

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

Conveners :

• Marleen RENSEN        M.J.M.Rensen@uva.nl  Assistant Professor, Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Joanny MOULIN          joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr  Professor, Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Aix Marseille univ, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.”

9. 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?

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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 20^th 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

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