Under the support of the respected Dean of the College of Arts, Prof. Dr. Majid Abdul-Hamid Al Kaabi, the College held on Wednesday evening 29-9-2021, within its scientific and cultural program, a scientific meeting that included a lecture entitled "Transformations of Biography Writing". Which was delivered by researcher and professor Dr. Salwa El Saadawi from the College of Arts, Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Manouba, Tunisia.
The lecture included a review of the development of this type of writing, which began in the early twentieth century and was called "Biography" and has well-known models, most notably Al-Ayyam by Taha Hussein. Then it developed with the development of other types of literature under the influence of social, scientific and technical changes, so it entered into the novel and into genres that tend toward imagination, such as what became known as “Autofiction”.
Finally, it has become present in social media and in various forms of expression, such as graffiti, and it has become an act practiced by ordinary people after it was the preserve of recognized great authors, and written in simple methods, after it was a literary genre written according to the standards of high literary writing and it became a representation of obscure individual identities facing marginalization, and and expression of their hopes and problems.
Dr. Salwa concluded that the new biography writing rebel against paper notebooks and strict classical theories. Facebook, for example, has become an open biography texts that depends on digital interaction. It informs about times of success, weddings, or holidays, giving opportunity for writing daily stories or self-ideas in the form of a short text.
The lecture witnessed many and varied interventions from professors and researchers from Algeria and Tunisia, professors of the College of Arts-University of Basrah, and postgraduate students in the Department of Arabic Language.
It is noteworthy that Dr. Salwa specialized in theoretical and applied narratives and biography writings, and she has a number of books, including the book "The Contemporary Arabic Novel with the First Person" presented by Dr. Muhammad Al-Qadi. It was published by Tunis Publishing House in 2010, and won the CREDIF Award for the best scientific theses in the same year. The book “Readings in Narrative Texts” in two editions: the first in 2015 and the second in 2021, and both editions were issued in Tunis Publishing House. As well as "The Book of True Lies, Who Said I'm Not Me (in the Problem of Autofiction)", presented by Dr. Saeed Yaqtin, and it was published by Roya Publishing House, Cairo, in 2019.
