[ Erinnerung | Memory ]

Zur "Genauigkeit" von Memoiren/Autobiografien/Tagebüchern wurde angelegentlich hier wie hier und an so mancher wieder zu findender Stelle der eine oder andere Verweis bereits platziert.

Umso mehr lässt sich nun auf den bevorstehenden Vortrag von

Julia Watson: Truth Matters. Autobiographical Hoaxes in the Age of Memoir
(21. Juni 2006, 19 Uhr; Universitätscampus Hof 1, Spitalgasse 2, Aula des AAKH, 1090 Wien)

hinweisen, der vom Ludwig Boltzmann Instituts für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie und dem Referat Genderforschung der Universität Wien organisiert wird.

Although Mark Twain suggested autobiography is “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, he also wrote a lengthy one. But the skepticism he voiced about the truth of memoir is shared by much of the reading public. In the US James Frey’s exaggerated addiction memoir created an uproar and was denounced as “A Million Little Lies.” In the Middle East, the veracity of some women’s narratives of honor killing has been challenged as undermining the work of human rights groups. Clearly scandal has shadowed life narrative as its uncanny double, not just now but for centuries. How may we understand the truth claims of autobiographical writing, and differentiate cynical fraud from strategic impersonation, performative hoax, and the literary borrowing of other lives? This talk will examine multiple kinds, and uses, of autobiographical narrative, both in the American context and globally, with women’s narratives of witnessing.

PhD. Julia Watson is Visiting Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at the Alpen-Adria Universität, Klagenfurt, for Summer 2006. She is Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, and was formerly Chair of Women’s Studies at two other universities.
With Sidonie Smith she has co-written Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001) and co-edited four collections of essays: Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998), Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996), and De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography (1992), as well as several essays on autobiography.
Their new collection, Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819-1919, will be published this summer. Watson has recently published essays on women writers of the American West, and on Holocaust artist-author Charlotte Salomon. She is at work on a book on documents and life narratives.