125260 VO Cultural Studies - MA M01 (2014S)

People are eternally fascinated by other people's life stories, and the urge to record these stories is often considered a basic human need. Notably, the popularity of biography as a cultural practice has exploded over the past few decades, spawning new forms and modes, and spreading to new media. The recent biography boom has also sparked a fresh interest in life-writing on the part of academia, with scholars from disciplines as diverse as literary studies, history, sociology, music, cultural studies, or ethnology contributing to the production and critical analysis of biographical work.
This interdisciplinary lecture series will bring together renowned scholars from different fields working on various historical epochs and auto/biographical practices. Themes that will occupy us throughout include subject representation and the notion of biographical truth, the questions whose lives get told, for what reasons, and in what form. Next to the conventional book-length treatment of a life we will critically investigate alternative and innovative forms of life-writing, such as fictional biographies, bio pics, bio plays, and virtual biographies.

13.3. Werner Huber & Julia Lajta-Novak (University of Vienna):
Introduction

20.3. Birgit Däwes (University of Vienna):
"Biography on Stage: Performing Native American Lives"

27.3. Ed Saunders (Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie, Vienna):
"Meta-Biography: Critical Approaches to Writing Lives"

03.4. Clare Brant (King's College, London):
"The Eighteenth-Century Letter as Public Auto/Biography"

10.4. Caitriona Ni D'huill (Durham University):
"Approaching the Master: Gender, Genre and (Meta)Biography, from Thomas Carlyle to Colm Tóibín"

08.5. Sandra Mayer (Vienna):
"Literary Biography and Celebrity: Re-Evaluating Victorian Authors from the Perspective of Celebrity Studies"

15.5. Claire Tomalin (London):
"The Challenges of Biography"

22.5. Peter Morgan (London/Vienna):
"Biography and the Screenwriter"

05.6. Vanessa Hannesschläger, Tobias Heinrich, Katharina Prager (Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie, Vienna):
"Virtual Biography: Life-Writing in New Media"

12.6. Julia Lajta-Novak (University of Vienna):
"Biography to Romance: Fictionalising Nell Gwyn"

26.6. Final Test.

Department of English and American Studies, in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography.