Autofiction’s Deceptions: Jewish Self-Writing
Description
Paul De Man famously argues that an autobiography is a mask that distorts the face it covers; this seminar wishes to discuss the flip side of that coin: fiction that masquerades as autobiography—which is one possible definition of autofiction. The only consensus autofiction invokes is that its definition is disputed (Mortimer 2009), as a genre, a mode of writing (Ferreira-Myers 2018) or reading (Effe & Gibbons 2022), or as a strategy to cope with the instability of truth, memory, and identity in contemporary culture. Hailed as the genre that encapsulates our cultural moment—be it the post-Truth or the Selfie era—autofiction poses a challenge to literary critics: do we need to revise the generic and narratological terms with which we analyze autofiction's system of referentiality? Is there anything new about autofiction—or is it a modification of known genres such as memoirs, autobiographies, or even historical fiction? More broadly, does the inflation of autofiction have anything to do with the crisis of readership we witness in the past couple of decades? Could it be that literature becomes increasingly self-reflexive—perhaps self-obsessed—as it becomes irrelevant?
Autofiction is a global phenomenon with particular manifestations and reception in various contexts. The term first appeared in Serge Doubrovsky’s work, one that is deeply informed by Jewish trauma (Boulé 2009). We propose to intersect the transnational system of autofiction with another global literary system: Jewish literature. Written in English, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish (and more), and with long standing traditions of grappling with self-reflexivity, intertextuality, identity, diasporic/minoritarian as well as hegemonic and settler-colonial positions, we propose Jewish literature as one possible arena to explore autofiction's deceptions. We would like to respond to the idea that Jewish identity is produced through texts and their reading rather than take a coherent notion of Jewishness for granted (Schreier 2015). Can we identify specific characteristics of Jewish autofiction? If so, how do these negotiate contemporary tensions of Jewish identity? How does contemporary autofiction of Jewish writers correspond with past iterations of Jewish self-writing?
Papers may relate to the rise of autofiction in the digital age, the allowance it grants younger writers to access autobiography, its expression of authorial anxieties prevalent among white, male authors vs. the participation of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community in writing autofiction. Papers exploring the terms in narratology and genre theory that autofiction intentionally blurs, as well as studies of cases that redefine the borders between fact and fiction are also welcome. We also invite papers that study the history of autofiction in Jewish literature as well as contemporary examples of Jewish autofiction.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Zoé Grange-Marczak is an agrégée and former student of the ENS de Lyon, and currently PhD candidate at the ENS (Paris). Her work focuses on Zionism, the State of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Sartre, Levinas and Derrida. She has recently published “Antisemites and Jews in the Critique of Dialectical Reason” (Studi Sartriani, XVIII, 2024) and on “Palestinian terrorism as contestation in Sartre and Derrida (1960-2004)”, (Cahiers Tocqueville des Jeunes Chercheurs, 5/1, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Dr. Shira Stav is a scholar of modern Hebrew literature, a senior lecturer in the department of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and a literary critic in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. She is the author of Reconstructing Daddy: Fathers and Daughters in Modern Hebrew Poetry (2014); The Return of the Absent Father: A New Reading of a chain of Stories from the Babylonian Talmud (2022, together with Haim Weiss).
Speaker Bio
Shira Mazuz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Literature department at The Hebrew University. Her dissertation project, 'Materializing Absence: The Aesthetics of Editing in Contemporary Film and Literature,' is a comparative study of documentary film and literature utilizing editing practices of preexisting sources in the exploration of personal narratives of grief, loss, and the vulnerable body.
Speaker Bio
Ella Elbaz is Assistant Professor in the Arabic Literature and Language Department of the University of Haifa. She is a scholar of Hebrew and Arabic contemporary prose, having completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Ethan Pack is a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature and in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at UCLA. He is also a Research Fellow at UCLA’s Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Pack’s work focuses on Hebrew and Arabic literature, German-Jewish intellectual history, and Postcolonial Studies. Pack is currently completing a book manuscript, Routes of Displacement: Visionary Poetics and Jewish Exile.
Speaker Bio
Yaakov Herskovitz is Assistant Professor of Eastern European Jewish Studies & Sarah and E. J. Evans Fellow in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His forthcoming book (SUNY Press) deals with the role literary self-translation played in the formation of Jewish national cultures. His research interests include Modern Hebrew & Yiddish literature, translation and affect theory.
Speaker Bio
Shiri Shapira is a PhD candidate exploring Jewish metafiction in the 21st century, as well as a Yiddish teacher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva. Her article “’There is no such thing as Yiddish literature’: Metafictional Doubling in I. B. Singer’s ‘Vanvild Kava’” appears soon in the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature. She has published many translations of German, English, and Yiddish literature to Hebrew, and will soon publish a volume of short fiction in Yiddish.
Speaker Bio
Sandra Chiritescu is Clinical Assistant Professor of Yiddish. She holds a BA in German philology from the University of Zurich and a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. Her dissertation “Bobes, Mames and Daughters: Uncovering Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Jewish and American Yiddish Feminist Genealogies” brings together her research interests in Yiddish literature and culture, American Jewish literature, feminist and queer theory, and translation theory.