Society for Women of Ideas Event

The Society for Women of Ideas invites you to a (virtual) lecture: 

Joyce Avrech Berkman
Singular and Typical: The Autobiographer’s We/I Conundrum

Thursday, October 5, 2:00 – 4:00 pm.
All are welcome! Please register here.

Bio:
Joyce Berkman is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Massachusetts where she taught from 1965-2014. She is the author of Olive Schreiner: Feminism on the Frontier, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism, Edith Stein’s Life in a Jewish Family, and the editor of Contemplating Edith Stein. Her leading secondary interest is in music theory, composition and piano performance.

Abstract

Among the many reasons that individuals write autobiographies is the urge to set forth both their individuality and their typicality. The we/I conundrum unconsciously shaping the self-narrative of philosopher, theologian and saint Edith Stein’s remarkable work, Life in a Jewish Family, 1891-1916: An Autobiography, offers us a valuable entry to a fundamental motif in countless first-person documents. As an early twentieth-century phenomenologist, Stein grappled with the classic issues of essence, type and individual. These appear in fascinating and complex ways in her life account.

Scholars retrospectively analyze an autobiographical text for what they reveal about a person’s experience and thought as representative (or not) of significant populations within a given time and place. Stein is not unusual in her claim that she and her family are typical, as when her “Forward” declares that her family exemplifies German Jewish people of her times. She insists on this typicality to justify her writing at a time of rampant antisemitism. And, yet, she is no less eager to display the myriad ways in which she and certain Stein family members are singular. Since this we/I tension also appears in her philosophical treatises, I plan to correlate her statements in her autobiography with her philosophical treatment of identity, women, and ethnicity in its individual and community experience.