Mercredi 14 décembre 2016 à 17h00.
Conférence du Séminaire Biographie.
Tobias Heinrich : Austrian Lektor in German literature and language at New College, University of Oxford.
« Exemplary lives – Why we read Biographies and what German Enlightenment has to say about it? »
Biographies are and have been since the eighteenth century one of the most popular genres on the book market: whether it be Plutarchs lives of Alexander and Caesar, Hermione Lee’s awardwinning biography of Virgina Woolf or Walter Isaacson’s bestselling book on Steve Jobs. This talk is going to examine the reasons for our ongoing fascination with biographies. In this respect, it will look at the German Enlightenment and the advocates of biography as the key genre of a hermeneutic worldview. The thoroughly modern assumption that man can be readable like a book is merged with older models of edification and spiritual formation through literature, resulting in the notion that we can acquire authority over our own biography only through the lens of the lives of others.
LERMA Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone
Lieu : Faculté ALLSH, 29 av. R. Schuman, Aix-en-Provence. Maison de la Recherche T2, salle 2.44 .