Life writing at the end of the world: evolving genres of the Self
Description
The non-fiction narrative self has increasingly appeared in a variety of genres over the last fifty years — in autofiction, the autobiographical novel, in creative or speculative non-fiction, New and Gonzo journalism, and autotheory, as well as across a range of digital platforms that challenge traditional life writing conventions. This boom in life stories has much to do with what Rob Nixon (2012) calls “part of a broader rise in the cultural industrialization of the real — or at least the real’s aura.” The idea of “the real’s aura” seems especially pertinent today in our post-truth world where empiricism is framed as suspect from a number of different political and philosophical perspectives. Hybrid forms of life narrative like autofiction often highlight acts of mediation; they challenge the divide between fiction and non-fiction, while highlighting and undermining the public's investment in the so-called “real.” Do these blurred lines between the fictional and non-fictional self provide a critical view of the self in a post-truth age, or do they simply capitulate to late capitalist desires for immediacy, as Anna Kornbluh suggests? How do they offer an opportunity to facilitate new articulations of the self in a moment of crisis — as well as a method for replicating neoliberalism’s reduction of all meaning to the individual? How do we distinguish between the fictional and non-fictional narrative alongside the rise of GenAI and hyperrealist “deepfakes?”
This seminar is interested in the playful and critical ways in which the self has been constructed through various genres. Key to our interest is the telling of the stories of the self and the ways in which those stories can be creatively reinvented, or critically told in diverse ways that challenge or subvert generic expectations. Autofictional works are of particular interest as they collapse fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography into texts, thwarting readerly expectations, but we are open to a variety of generic approaches to these questions.
Potential Topics include:
- Exploring what Nixon calls “the grey zone between fiction and non-fiction”
- Autofictionality and hybrid forms of life writing in a post-truth age
- Autofiction in digital and other new media forms
- The rise of GenAI and other synthetic media in relation to the non-fictional self
- Autofiction in the writing classroom
- The role of marginalized writers in capitalizing on contemporary autofictions
- Autofiction as a brand or marketing category or a subversion of efforts to be pigeonholed
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Fiona Doloughan is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the Open University, UK. She has published widely on aspects of contemporary narrative, producing three monographs, the latest of which, Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel (Anthem Press), has just been reprinted in paperback. In addition, she has published several book chapters and articles. She is currently working on a fourth monograph on the concept of voice in contemporary literature.
Speaker Bio
Cobi Chiodo Powell is a PhD student in English at SUNY Stony Brook.
Speaker Bio
Ralph Clare is an adjunct professor at various NYC universities. He is the author of Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture (Rutgers, 2014) and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace (Cambridge, 2018). He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Aufofiction. His latest book project, Metaffective Fiction: Structuring Feeling in Contemporary American Literature, explores emotion and affect in post-postmodern fiction.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Concetta Principe is a scholar of trauma, ethics and a mad poetics. Mad Speculations: Anne Carson’s Messiahs and the Canadian Unconscious, is coming out with Peter Lang (2026). Her monograph, Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s Real: A Lacanian Approach, was published by Palgrave Macmillan (2015). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, Psychoanalytische Perspecteven, among others. She is Assistant Professor at Trent University, Canada.
Speaker Bio
Qianting Lu is currently Lecturer in English Studies at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business. She obtained her Ph.D. in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University in 2023. Her research focuses on Asian diasporic literature, global Anglophone writing, life writing and postcolonial theory.
Speaker Bio
Terri Tomsky is an Associate Professor of contemporary literature in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. She has published in the areas of human rights literary studies, life writing, cultural memory and trauma, cosmopolitanism, as well as the Global War on Terror. She has recently completed a book manuscript on Guantánamo, which examines the many forms of cultural activism inspired by the prison’s injustices.
Speaker Bio
I work at the intersection of hemispheric American studies, media studies, and comparative literature, and received my PhD in American Studies from Yale. I am currently a fellow at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst, where I am working on a geopolitical labor history of five technologies of self—psychoanalysis, film, the enneagram, the rotoscope, and the tarot—that emerged or became popular in pre- and peri-Cold War North and South America.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (2013) and co-editor of Broken Record: Gendered Abuse in Academia (2025) and #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture (2021). Currently she is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Postmodernisms and has forthcoming chapters on autofiction and "metamodernism."
Speaker Bio
Eamon Schlotterback is a postdoctoral fellow in Northeastern University where she earned her doctorate in literature. Schlotterback studies autobiographical literature by trans writers focusing on the creative dimensions of trans existence. She has previously worked at the Digital Transgender Archive and Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her work can be read in Feminist Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature.
Speaker Bio
Emily Johansen is professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of two monographs that consider how contemporary literature imagines global connection: Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (2014) and Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life (2021). She is also the co-editor, with Alissa G. Karl, of two edited collections: Neoliberalism and the Novel (2017) and Rereading Empathy (2022).