KIRSTEN OLSON LANIER
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about what, and who grants this authority. O'Brien, the octogenarian of
the conference, recalled his undergraduate training when it was simply
understood-in the 1920S and 1930s-that certain forms of scholarship
and "traditional" historical methods were inviolate and preferred, and
others were discredited and lesser. As the force of the dialog over the
twentieth century has largely been to call into question such inviolate
notions of authority and authenticity (Who is served by such notions and
why? Whose truth is represented by such views?) the scholarly world of
biography, autobiography, and memoir has become much less defined and
far more complex. Older-style biographers like Jeffery Meyers seem some–
what unconscious and unanalyzed, but are we ready for the fictionalized
projections like Morris's portrayal of Reagan? Ultimately, what truth do
we want to know and why? Who is keeping track of what is important
("Are we all fictive selves?" an audience member queried), and what
sources can be trusted?
If
truth and sense of meaning and mattering must
be found within ourselves, do we each actually have an essentiality, a self
within "which passes show?" In contemporary life do we have the equip–
ment to produce such authenticity in the individual and atomized self?
At the crux of how we Illake meaning and judge value in these three
contemporary forms, writers of them offered powerful views of being
chased by their stories, entrapped by them, escaping through them. The
accidental sagacity involved in finding the story of another's life-or
finding one's own in the story-was also a piece of the play among the
enlivened, impassioned adventurers speaking here. The ways in which a
"subject's life forces its coherence upon one's own mind" in Jay Mar–
tin's words Illade the conference a delightfully complex scholarly medi–
tation on the illlaginative outlines of human life.
In terms of "Su nda y Styles of Academ ia": There a re a sign ifica nt
number of academics out in the world who still read papers to audi–
ences. These papers are highly literate and require extensive scaffolding
to follow-they are not blithely entertaining and they do assume some
perquisites to learning. Not only were the ideas in the papers presented
at this conference weighty, building on each other and heavily refer–
enced with philosophy, history, and literature, the words were intri–
cately crafted. And mattered. This is in increasing contrast
to
some
socia I science and ed uca tion resea rch con ferences one attends, where
bullet point presentations are the norm and audiences are assumed to
have choke-collar short attention spans. There was no pandering here,
no apologies for intensity of intellectual experience or intellectual
demand. Consequently, I think, the conference was entertaining, lively,
fun.
