[Discussion] Fact and Fiction: Autobiography after the Death of the Author

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Fact and Fiction: Autobiography after the Death of the Author

This is a call for papers for an interdisciplinary conference on
contemporary autobiographical practices. Deadline for abstract
submissions (200-300 words): *15 December 2004.*

CONCEPTUAL OUTLINE:

Autobiography, it appears, did not die even after the Author was
famously deprived of his privileged status and given a ceremonial
burial. In fact, the autobiographical impulse, or the urge to tell one's
own story, seems to have proliferated, as has the urge to read other
people's stories.

In the world that emerged from fascism and colonialism, the
autobiographical impulse became as much a vehicle for new emancipatory
urges as a means of coming to terms with the past. More recently, in an
era of new wars and conflict, of powerful global forces taking over the
local, the individual, the private, the autobiographical impulse is more
virulent than ever, exercised by some as a form of resistance -
individual or collective - and by others as a means of
self-aggrandizement. Perhaps the current popularity of autobiography
also expresses a yearning for the real and the tactile in a world with
ever more virtual spheres of experience.

The urge to tell one's own story manifests itself in a variety of forms
- in autobiographies, memoirs, testimonies, diaries, letters, oral
histories, and more recently in the personal webpage, chat rooms and
emails. It articulates itself not only in prose, but also in poetry,
painting, film and other modes of expression. But the proliferation and
multiple forms of the autobiographical act as well as its different
functions provide further evidence of its essentially performative
nature, with its blending of fact and fiction, memory and amnesia, the
referential and the textual, the historical and the rhetorical. Does
this fuzzy logic undermine the distinctness of autobiography as a genre?
Or does it provide a key to understanding writing in general and
literature in particular?

It has been said that the autobiographer writes about others when he
writes about himself and that we cannot write about others without
writing about ourselves. It has also been argued that memory is not an
instrument to explore the past but the medium through which past
experience is filtered for the purpose of giving shape to the future.
The seminar will engage with these issues in the context of contemporary
autobiographical practices.

For further details, write to the e-mail address shown below.

Head,
Department of Germanic & Romance Studies,
University of Delhi,
Delhi - 110007, INDIA
Phone: 91-11-27666426
Email: smazumdar@gmx.net <mailto:smazumdar@gmx.net>