Lecturer: Klára Soukupová (Prague).
Annotation:
The genre of autobiography is often situated on borderline between fiction and non-fiction; autobiography refers to real characters and events, but at the same time it is a literary work of art, a verbal construct. The lecture concentrates on major problems of the genre of autobiography (truth, memory, subjectivity) as well as on history of autobiography (canonical texts) and it goes through development of theory of autobiography in 20th century.
The lecture is a part of the series Me and the World … Autobiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Lecturer: Jürg Glauser (Zürich).
Annotation:
Icelandic literary culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still bears many traces of the medieval tradition. This is also the case when it comes to representations of self-conceptions as expressed in early modern autobiographies. The present paper deals primarily with two representative examples of the genre,
1) the priest Jón Magnússon’s (1610-96) Píslarsaga (1658-59, ‘Story of Sufferings’(English translation by Michael Fell as And Though This World with Devils filled. A Story of Sufferings, 2007)
2) Sjálfsævisaga (1750ff., ‘Autobiography’) by the priest síra Þorsteinn Pétursson á Staðarbakka (1710-85) Beyond being quite remarkable representations of autobiographies in general, the two texts display a number of features that are specific for this genre in the pre-modern era, such as the creations of individual selves in relation to God and society, the importance of Christian faith, belief, religion and theology, the vital role mental and physical health plays in the narratives. In Píslarsaga, an additional element that defines the text in a very specific manner are the descriptions of the prosecution of putative sorcerers in seventeenth century Iceland.
The lecture is a part of the series Me and the World … Autobiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
