Crossing Borders: Personal Narratives of 20th Century Writers/Critical Thinkers
This panel focuses on autobiographical writings of twentieth-century poets, writers, and critical thinkers who have been exiled or dislocated from their place of origin. Such personal narratives offer a unique and significant contribution to questions concerning the notions of “place,” “borders” and “diaspora”; they also frequently attest to personal suffering and shed light on the influence of traumatic experience on the writers’ literary, philosophical or theoretical work. How does the relation between writing and remembering manifest itself as the beginning of a discursive (sometimes but not always national) space? How can the transmission of loss or trauma across borders generate a theoretical discursive space? How do these autobiographical narratives redefine space?
We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to: writing and remembering, exile and nation, displaced subjects, new identities, perception and consciousness, physical and/vs. psychical realities, the interrelation between private and public voice.