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.