The title of my presentation is borrowed from the French literary writer Annie Ernaux who published a series of books that attracted a considerable international readership. Together with her colleagues Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis she is part of a group of writers that, inspired by Bourdieu’s work, consider their texts less as accounts of their individual lives than as an attempt to understand the social fabric through exploring lived experience, while understanding lived experience as a reflection of and response to social power relations and social changes.
In a similar move, in sociolinguistics, the increasing interest in ethnographical approaches has sparked off discussions about self-reflexivity and about making the researcher’s positionality, lived experience and emotional involvement productive for the research process (Hassemer & Flubacher 2020). Although autoethnographical works per se are still rather marginal, the insertion of autobiographical or -ethnographical elements such as vignettes is becoming a common practice. According to Rampton et al. (2014) vignettes are “designed to provide the reader with some apprehension of the fullness and irreducibility of the ‘lived stuff’ from which the analyst has abstracted structure”.
Based on my own experience in introducing autobiographical and -ethnographical elements in my research and teaching practice as well as on the (academic and literary) readings that inspired me on this path, I will discuss what could be called the ‘autobiographical dilemma’ – a question that has preoccupied thinkers like Derrida, Bourdieu and Butler who, in one way or the other, share the fascination for and the skepticism toward this genre. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ (1964/1980) reflections about the vignettes in an 18th century encyclopedia and on Alfred Lorenzer’s (2006) conceptualization of scenic understanding I will elaborate on strengths and limitations of auto-ethnographical vignettes and, with reference to a text example, discuss the multiple ‘I’s’ involved in the process of writing such texts.
Barthes, R. (1964/1980). The Plates of the Encyclopedia. In R. Barthes, New critical essays (pp. 23–39). New York: Hill and Wang.
Hassemer, J. & Flubacher, M. (2020). Prekäre Ethnographie. Zur Rolle von Prekaritätserfahrungen im ethnographischen Erkenntnisprozess. Wiener Linguistische Gazette, 85, 157–182.
Lorenzer, A. (2006). Szenisches Verstehen. Zur Erkenntnis des Unbewußten. Marburg: Tectum.
Rampton, B., Maybin, J. & Roberts, C. (2014). Methodological foundations in linguistic ethnography. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 125, 2–25.
