The program “The Collective Me: Auto-Socio-Biography as a Hybrid Genre” will take place on June 8th & 9th, 2023.

Yasmina Reza’s Serge, Edouard Louis’ En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Thomas Chatterton William’s Self-Portrait in Black and White, and Natasha Wodin’s She came from Mariupol are recent examples of a blossoming genre: the autobiography. It is obvious, though, that in these texts, which are narrated in first person, it is often not an inner self that is put before the reader, but rather an array of much larger social, cultural, political or historical themes. In this new wave of texts, for which Annie Ernaux has coined the adjective “auto-socio-biographique”, the lines between fact and fiction, between subjectivity and objectivity, between documentary and literary writing, between introspection, personal experience, historical research, and social analysis are blurred. Wiko is lucky to count authors among its present and former Fellows who have masterfully contributed to the new genre and are ready to share their thoughts and experiences in the course of the coming Meeting of the Fellows’ Club: Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory deciphers the author’s failing attempt to retrieve the history of her Russian Jewish family. NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names narrates a life that, like her own, leads from Zimbabwe to North America. Lea Ypi, not a novelist like the two others but a political philosopher, goes back to her Albanian childhood in Free. From whichever point one arrives at this genre, there is unfailingly a tension between subjectivity and the attempt at critical visions of reality. How do writers in this genre actually deal with facts, sources, and personal memories? To what degree do their narrations differ from those of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists? And why is the “auto-socio-biography” so popular in our times of identity crisis?

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Friday, June 9, 2022

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