Others and Selves: Exofiction, Autofiction, and the Fictions of Truth
Description
The seminar dedicates itself to texts from diverse linguistic and cultural traditions that have been described as “exofiction,” “autofiction” and related hybrid forms (such as autosociobiography and autotheory). While these genres each engage in complex negotiations between lived experience and narrative invention, exofiction and autofiction are rarely, if ever, examined in direct relation to one another. The seminar seeks to break new ground by placing these genres in dialogue. It asks what emerges when narratives of the self are considered alongside fictionalized accounts of historical others. Our working hypothesis is that both exofiction and autofictional genres bear witness to the rise of authenticity as a contested literary category, one whose cultural force derives less from any stable claim to truth than from the negotiations it stages between selfhood, alterity, and the protocols of narrative form.
Papers are invited to address the truth-strategies employed by these genres and how they negotiate the porous boundary between fact and fiction; the constructions of subjectivity and the performativity of identity; the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes involved in fictionalizing the self and the other; the reconfigurations of history and memory; what kind of authority, if at all, is attributed to “self” and “other” in these genres; questions of translation, adaptation, and circulation; the literary marketplace and the boom of autofictional genres. Papers may address these questions comparatively, across genres, but they may also be dedicated to individual genres and case studies.
The seminar is equally interested in inquiries that address the conceptual and methodological challenges that these genres pose for scholarship. We welcome papers that consider which critical gestures prove fruitful for engaging with exofictional, autofictional, and related hybrid texts—and where established approaches falter? How do these genres pressure or bypass established interpretive frameworks and what new theoretical vocabularies might be required to engage them more productively?
We welcome papers from a range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, including but not limited to literary studies, critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black studies, postcolonial studies, philosophy, and cultural studies.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
E. L. McCallum, professor of English & Film Studies at Michigan State, wrote Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism and Unmaking The Making of Americans: Toward an Aesthetic Ontology. She coedited After Queer Studies; The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature; and Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Recently coedited an issue of Regeneration journal on “Nature Bites Back: The Anti-Pastoral Thesis in Queer & Trans Studies” and a Symploke forum, "The Ethics of Close Reading?"
Speaker Bio
Barbara Browning received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, and has taught for the last thirty years in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of several academic books (most recently The Miniaturists - Duke University Press) and three novels (most recently The Gift - Coffee House Press - recipient of a Lambda Literary Award). barbarabrowning.info
Speaker Bio
John Namjun Kim is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, German and Japanese at the University of California, Riverside. He is currently completing his book on the German/Japanese writer Yoko Tawada and the history of German philosophy. His work has appeared in journals such as Text+Kritik, The Germanic Review, The German Quarterly, positions: east asia, cultures, critique, among others.
Speaker Bio
I am a PhD student associated with the International Research Training Group "Baltic Peripeties. Narratives of Reformations, Revolutions, and Catastrophes" at the University of Greifswald, where I also completed my M.A. in German Literature Studies. I am interested in contemporary literature, autofiction and life-writing, and ecohumanities.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Júlia Dariva is a Ph.D. candidate at the Post-Graduate Program of English: Linguistic and Literary Studies at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Her research interests are centered on the investigation of the affective relationships between fans and their objects through a cultural materialist lens.
Speaker Bio
Madeline Zimring is a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores conceptions of truth in contemporary French, German, and Norwegian autofiction.
Speaker Bio
Clara Busch (she/her) is a PhD candidate in German at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis considers forms of autotheory and the politics of writing in contemporary German texts with research publications forthcoming in Working Papers in the Humanities and Oxford German Studies.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Thomas Wortmann is a professor of German studies at the University of Mannheim. He works on German-language literature from the 18th to the 21st century, contemporary drama and theater, and film.
Speaker Bio
Fabienne Steeger holds a Master of Arts and a Master of Education from Bielefeld University. Since 2022, she has been a PhD Student and Research Assistant at the Institute for German Philology at LMU Munich. Her dissertation “Selbsterkundungen im sozialen Raum. Aufstiegsnarrative in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren” is based on archival material and investigates early forms of German-language autosociobiographies and their publishing contexts from a literary-historical and sociological perspective.
Speaker Bio
Marieke Mueller is a Lecturer in French at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She completed her PhD at Oxford University and has taught at Oxford, King's College London, and Paris Nanterre. She has published on contemporary fiction, theories of reading, Sartre, existentialism, and theories of violence, and is currently working on a project on social mobility in the contemporary novel in English, French and German.