Ryan Szpiech: Narrating the New Self: Conversion Stories as Autobiography

In this lecture, I will discuss the first-person accounts of various medieval religious converts including Hermann the Jew, Abner of Burgos, and Anselm Turmeda. I will consider how the basic form of a conversion story—from Paul and Augustine to Bunyon, Rousseau, and Joyce—lends itself to narrative drama, suggesting that autobiography is not just a portrait of the self, but a story of the self’s transformation.

Ryan Szpiech (University of Michigan) je romanista a odborník na středověkou literaturu, autor knihy Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), která v roce 2015 získala mezinárodní knižní cenu La corónica.