The History of Autobiography and Byzantine Literature Byzantium/Modernism

This paper was delivered by Stratis Papaioannou at the Byzantine/Modernism Symposium in a panel entitled, "Byzantine Subjectivity in Modernity," which also included a paper by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and was chaired by Roland Betancourt. Professor Papaioannou's paper analyzes the (mis-)reading of Byzantine self-referential writing in Georg Misch’s Geschichte der Autobiographie, the first volume of which appeared in 1907. Misch's volumes purported to provide a universal history and genealogy of modern subjectivity, expanding traditions of thought that were to be continued as well as radically challenged by the various modernist movements.