Laura Cernat
KU Leuven, English Literature, Post-Doc
This article focuses on Colum McCann’s biofiction "TransAtlantic" (2013), which it reads alongside Colson Whitehead’s speculative historical fiction "The Underground Railroad" (2016) in order to bring into sharp focus the kind of... more
This article focuses on Colum McCann’s biofiction "TransAtlantic" (2013), which it reads alongside Colson Whitehead’s speculative historical fiction "The Underground Railroad" (2016) in order to bring into sharp focus the kind of cultural, political, and intellectual service biofiction by or about African Americans can perform. By lifting the veil from the mechanisms of oppressive power, these two novels expose common structures that were operational during the slave trade across the Atlantic as well as the “starve trade” in Ireland. My main conceptual building block is Ian Baucom’s model of two poles of realism (“actuarial” and “melancholy”), which I expand to suggest that McCann and Whitehead complicate this polarity, allowing the actuarial mode to integrate liberation strategies for the oppressed and nuancing the melancholy mode to circumvent the risk of sentimentalism. In both cases, the strength of interracial agency and intersectional thought points towards lines of flight from the actuarial-melancholic binary.
Research Interests:
The way in which artistic writing is depicted in biofiction, especially in the case of Hollywood biopics but also in some acclaimed biographical novels, tends to distort the complexities of the creative process, overemphasizing the notion... more
The way in which artistic writing is depicted in biofiction, especially in the case of Hollywood biopics but also in some acclaimed biographical novels, tends to distort the complexities of the creative process, overemphasizing the notion of inspiration and perpetuating what I call a “reader’s bias”, fueled by the mystique of the first page. In this chapter, biofictional and cinematographic mythologies of writers at work are briefly discussed and compared to an exception: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), my main case study. Contrasting this novel with other biofictions, as well as tracing the connections and discrepancies between Coetzee’s novel and Dostoevsky’s life and texts, can shed light on the old controversy around the implied author and reframe the relevance of the biographical. The intertwining of biography and autobiography, literary criticism, history and counterfactual elements in Coetzee’s text suggests that literature performs a more complex task than the simple separation or the simple conjunction of a biographical self and an ‘abstract author’ (see Lintvelt 1989, 17‒22; Kindt and Müller 2006, 130‒6). Furthermore, Coetzee’s example points towards the unique affordances of the novel at a time when biographical and biofictional narratives are ubiquitous across media and accessible in popular genres that hold sway over larger audiences. The chapter makes this argument by drawing extensively not just on biofiction scholarship and narratology (especially focusing on the implied author and on the technique of metalepsis), but also on a close study of Dostoevsky biographies, published notebooks, and scholarship about his manuscripts.
Research Interests:
This introduction to the Special issue of Dacoromania litteraria on Eastern and South-Eastern European Women's Life Writing (10/2023) presents and motivates our grouping of the articles in the issue under three topics: witnessing,... more
This introduction to the Special issue of Dacoromania litteraria on Eastern and South-Eastern European Women's Life Writing (10/2023) presents and motivates our grouping of the articles in the issue under three topics: witnessing, enduring (understood both in relation to suffering and to duration) and recovering (both in the sense of unearthing cultural memory and of personal and collective healing).
If it is true that we are living, as trauma theorists have been considering for decades, in what Shoshana Felman (1992) called an “age of testimony”, where Life Writing with a traumatic core has become one of the main literary forms, this is happening because of a perceived “crisis of truth” that started even before the digital era. The paradox that shores the fragments of memory work against the ruins of a monolithic notion of historical truth, making trauma memorialization necessary and, by the same token, difficult, does not seem to have an expiry date. The discarding of Fukuyama’s “end of history” paradigm by Eastern European studies, highlighted, among others, by Agnieszka Mrozik and Anja Tippner (2021) in connection to the rise of late-socialism-themed autofiction, also means that the cultural work performed by Life Writing cannot be framed only through the grid of a retrospective relevance. On the contrary, analyzing women’s auto/biographical, autofictional, and diaristic writings from the early twentieth-century to the early twenty-first, and from various areas of transcultural confluence (from the former Habsburg Empire to the former Yugoslavia, as well as Lower Silesia, Transylvania, and other multiethnic areas), as this special issue does, contributes not just to the understanding of the past, but also to that of the present.
Three intertwined notions – agency, persistence, and legacy – circumscribe the issue’s thematic cohesion, while methodologically its main strength lies in the ability to subvert and challenge the epistemic homogeneity in the field of Life Writing and memory studies by not just bringing local examples into dialogue with Western scholarship, but also building on theory coming out of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which in many cases has not been translated yet, and which is used alongside the Western paradigms of understanding and interpreting cultural work. In favoring this close interaction between Western-imported models and the theoretical models of cultural critics with firsthand experience of the inner dynamics of particular Eastern European fields, we respond to a call for epistemic diversification launched a few years ago by scholars such as Chen-Bar Itzhak (2020), who drew attention to the imbalance between the relative democratization of World Literature and the enduring Western hegemony in literary theory, and called for a “World Republic of Theory” corresponding to the World Republic of Letters.
If it is true that we are living, as trauma theorists have been considering for decades, in what Shoshana Felman (1992) called an “age of testimony”, where Life Writing with a traumatic core has become one of the main literary forms, this is happening because of a perceived “crisis of truth” that started even before the digital era. The paradox that shores the fragments of memory work against the ruins of a monolithic notion of historical truth, making trauma memorialization necessary and, by the same token, difficult, does not seem to have an expiry date. The discarding of Fukuyama’s “end of history” paradigm by Eastern European studies, highlighted, among others, by Agnieszka Mrozik and Anja Tippner (2021) in connection to the rise of late-socialism-themed autofiction, also means that the cultural work performed by Life Writing cannot be framed only through the grid of a retrospective relevance. On the contrary, analyzing women’s auto/biographical, autofictional, and diaristic writings from the early twentieth-century to the early twenty-first, and from various areas of transcultural confluence (from the former Habsburg Empire to the former Yugoslavia, as well as Lower Silesia, Transylvania, and other multiethnic areas), as this special issue does, contributes not just to the understanding of the past, but also to that of the present.
Three intertwined notions – agency, persistence, and legacy – circumscribe the issue’s thematic cohesion, while methodologically its main strength lies in the ability to subvert and challenge the epistemic homogeneity in the field of Life Writing and memory studies by not just bringing local examples into dialogue with Western scholarship, but also building on theory coming out of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which in many cases has not been translated yet, and which is used alongside the Western paradigms of understanding and interpreting cultural work. In favoring this close interaction between Western-imported models and the theoretical models of cultural critics with firsthand experience of the inner dynamics of particular Eastern European fields, we respond to a call for epistemic diversification launched a few years ago by scholars such as Chen-Bar Itzhak (2020), who drew attention to the imbalance between the relative democratization of World Literature and the enduring Western hegemony in literary theory, and called for a “World Republic of Theory” corresponding to the World Republic of Letters.
Research Interests:
This chapter, co-written by Michael Lackey and Laura Cernat, explores biofiction as a response to Barthes’s Death of the Author theory by focusing on a set of biofictions that recast authors from the past as characters. We argue that, in... more
This chapter, co-written by Michael Lackey and Laura Cernat, explores biofiction as a response to Barthes’s Death of the Author theory by focusing on a set of biofictions that recast authors from the past as characters. We argue that, in reaction to postmodernism’s ontological destabilization and pervasive irony, biofictions seek a re-grounding in the values that past writers are still able to reveal to us today. We open our illustration of this point with an interpretation of two of Woody Allen’s films, which expose the hollowness of disregarding an author’s own take on their works and emphasize the continued relevance of lessons learned from great modernists. Moving on to our literary examples, we use testimonies by authors as well as textual examples from Maggie Gee and Colm Tóibín to highlight biofiction’s polemic take on the Death of the Author and develop a theory of “double anchoring”, meaning that writer-inspired biofictions have a two-tiered approach to the literary tradition, integrating both factual details about the authors they portray and intertextual elements from these authors’ works. Our main case studies, analyzed in the subsequent sections, can be divided into biofictions that work inside the postmodern paradigm, revealing its limits and challenging it from within, such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), and biofictions that break away from the perpetual instability of truth models, proposing new ways of constructing authors by not just acknowledging the inaccessibility of the past in an ever-repeated deconstructive gesture, but by also proposing alternative views of the past which can offer more than factual narratives do, as we show with the examples of Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). We conclude that, while many authors of biofiction are aware of contemporary theory’s
erasure of the author, they not only reject the idea that it is a total erasure but have also resurrected a version of the writer that is an amalgamation of fact and fiction.
erasure of the author, they not only reject the idea that it is a total erasure but have also resurrected a version of the writer that is an amalgamation of fact and fiction.
Research Interests: Authorship and Biofiction
This introduction to a guest-edited special focus issue on Autofiction and Autotheory of American Book Review traces some of the origins of the contemporary debates around autofiction and its newer counterpart, autotheory, bringing the... more
This introduction to a guest-edited special focus issue on Autofiction and Autotheory of American Book Review traces some of the origins of the contemporary debates around autofiction and its newer counterpart, autotheory, bringing the voices of foundational figures like Serge Doubrovsky, Philippe Vilain, or Marie Darrieussecq in dialogue with more recent approaches by theorists of autofiction, like Arnaud Schmitt, and by practitioners like Tope Folarin. The central question the introductory text asks is whether autofiction and autotheory, which both started out as subversive genres, designed to challenge the status-quo, are sometimes used as generic labels which enhance the visibility of some writers (predominantly white) while excluding others. The contributions in the special issue pick up this reflection theme, analyzing autofictions and autotheory works at both ends of the spectrum (refugee autofictions, autotheory books by BIPOC and queer writers, etc. as well as ambivalent, slippery works that flirt with neoliberal complicity while attempting to maintain an aesthetic claim) and engaging with the genre's advocates as well as its detractors.
Research Interests:
The introduction situates the question of gender in biographical fiction in relation to current scholarship on biofiction, life writing, and historical fiction, and establishes a dialogue between biofiction studies and gender-sensitive... more
The introduction situates the question of gender in biographical fiction in relation to current scholarship on biofiction, life writing, and historical fiction, and establishes a dialogue between biofiction studies and gender-sensitive approaches to both life writing and historical fiction. Clarifying the often complex and contradictory understandings of key terms that have emerged in recent scholarship on biofiction, historical fiction, life writing, and their inter-relationships, the introduction discusses the ethics of biofiction and the notion of biographical authenticity; the persistence of conventional tropes of femininity, masculinity, and gender normativity in biofiction; the aesthetics of agency in post-Lukácsian biofiction and historical fiction; and the role of creativity in imagining feminist, queer, and non-binary pasts.The introduction then outlines the volume’s individual chapters and the common themes or approaches that connect them, including gender and power relati...
Research Interests:
This introduction to a guest-edited special focus issue on Autofiction and Autotheory of American Book Review traces some of the origins of the contemporary debates around autofiction and its newer counterpart, autotheory, bringing the... more
This introduction to a guest-edited special focus issue on Autofiction and Autotheory of American Book Review traces some of the origins of the contemporary debates around autofiction and its newer counterpart, autotheory, bringing the voices of foundational figures like Serge Doubrovsky, Philippe Vilain, or Marie Darrieussecq in dialogue with more recent approaches by theorists of autofiction, like Arnaud Schmitt, and by practitioners like Tope Folarin. The central question the introductory text asks is whether autofiction and autotheory, which both started out as subversive genres, designed to challenge the status-quo, are sometimes used as generic labels which enhance the visibility of some writers (predominantly white) while excluding others. The contributions in the special issue pick up this reflection theme, analyzing autofictions and autotheory works at both ends of the spectrum (refugee autofictions, autotheory books by BIPOC and queer writers, etc. as well as ambivalent, slippery works that flirt with neoliberal complicity while attempting to maintain an aesthetic claim) and engaging with the genre's advocates as well as its detractors.
Research Interests:
This paper analyses the portrayal of Lucia Joyce (James Joyce’s daughter) in older biographical sources and recent fictionalizations. Unveiling the prejudice and misunderstanding that drove early accounts to dismiss her talents and reduce... more
This paper analyses the portrayal of Lucia Joyce (James Joyce’s daughter) in older biographical sources and recent fictionalizations. Unveiling the prejudice and misunderstanding that drove early accounts to dismiss her talents and reduce her to the part of the mentally disabled daughter of a brilliant father, the overview goes on to show how gradual efforts were made to uncover and do justice to her narrative. The discussion then focuses on biofictions about Lucia Joyce, showing how they typically project a future as compensation for Lucia’s lost past. However, often these alternative scenarios are tinted by a strong note of escapism. The exceptions are a graphic novel and a set of films, which thanks to the flexibility of their media constitute clearer reflections of Lucia’s dancing career and depict her mental health struggles more subtly. Returning Lucia to the medium of expression she was most at home in, the dance films display a sophisticated use of metaphor and rhythm.
Research Interests:
<p>This article builds on a reading of four novels which fictionalise various aspects of Virginia Woolf's life: Michael Cunningham's <italic>The Hours</italic> (1999), Susan Sellers's <italic>Vanessa... more
<p>This article builds on a reading of four novels which fictionalise various aspects of Virginia Woolf's life: Michael Cunningham's <italic>The Hours</italic> (1999), Susan Sellers's <italic>Vanessa and Virginia</italic> (2008), and Priya Parmar's <italic>Vanessa and Her Sister</italic> (2014), and Norah Vincent's <italic>Adeline</italic> (2015). Using scenes or techniques from these novels as examples, I develop the binary opposition between authenticity (fidelity to facts) and what Ina Schabert called 'poetic essentiality' (fidelity to character) into a four-fold system of oppositions, trying to prove that the accurate use of facts and the loyal representation of personality are neither always in conjunction nor always opposed. Thus, I propose four categories instead of two: creative inaccuracy (slightly straying from the facts in order to better convey character), delusive inaccuracy (straying from the facts in such a way that what we know of Woolf's character is altered in the fictional representation), delusive accuracy (invoking the facts without error, but assembling them in such a way as to convey the character misleadingly), and creative accuracy (inventing, but within the limits of the facts, especially applied to fantasizing dialogues, fleshing out scenes that were only schematic in the documents). Although examples from one of the four novels are used for each of the four categories, I argue that none of the strategies is employed exclusively by any novelist, which is why I conclude with a second table, depicting the connection between the four features as a continuum rather than a set of oppositions.</p>
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Literature and Criticism
In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three nineteenth-century authors: S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and... more
In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three nineteenth-century authors: S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and longest quotation is from Coleridge’s The Friend. However, oddly enough, Woolf seems to misunderstand Coleridge’s intention and/ or creatively misuse his words. Taking this understudied detail as its pivot, this article explores Woolf’s conception about war and community as it relates to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge’s. Drawing on Woolf scholarship (Beer, Black, Lounsberry, Saint-Amour, Snaith, Wood, etc.), as well as diaries and correspondence, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the “Outsiders’ Society”, thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf’s reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf’s framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, paying attention especially to the use of words like “illusion” and “fact”. Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes the quotation from him used by Woolf in the endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend, but also offers a broader overview of Coleridge’s own changing opinions on community and conflict, from “Fears in Solitude” to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. By employing this array of sources, the article points out some strong discrepancies between Woolf’s and Coleridge’s convictions, which render her recourse to his political writings counterintuitive. However, the paper also reveals a strong affinity between the two writers regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies like greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf’s gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three nineteenth-century authors: S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and... more
In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three nineteenth-century authors: S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and longest quotation is from Coleridge’s The Friend. However, oddly enough, Woolf seems to misunderstand Coleridge’s intention and/ or creatively misuse his words. Taking this understudied detail as its pivot, this article explores Woolf’s conception about war and community as it relates to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge’s.
Drawing on Woolf scholarship (Beer, Black, Lounsberry, Saint-Amour, Snaith, Wood, etc.), as well as diaries and correspondence, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the “Outsiders’ Society”, thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf’s reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf’s framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, paying attention especially to the use of words like “illusion” and “fact”. Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes the quotation from him used by Woolf in the endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend, but also offers a broader overview of Coleridge’s own changing opinions on community and conflict, from “Fears in Solitude” to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. By employing this array of sources, the article points out some strong discrepancies between Woolf’s and Coleridge’s convictions, which render her recourse to his political writings counterintuitive. However, the paper also reveals a strong affinity between the two writers regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies like greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf’s gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.
Drawing on Woolf scholarship (Beer, Black, Lounsberry, Saint-Amour, Snaith, Wood, etc.), as well as diaries and correspondence, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the “Outsiders’ Society”, thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf’s reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf’s framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, paying attention especially to the use of words like “illusion” and “fact”. Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes the quotation from him used by Woolf in the endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend, but also offers a broader overview of Coleridge’s own changing opinions on community and conflict, from “Fears in Solitude” to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. By employing this array of sources, the article points out some strong discrepancies between Woolf’s and Coleridge’s convictions, which render her recourse to his political writings counterintuitive. However, the paper also reveals a strong affinity between the two writers regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies like greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf’s gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.
Research Interests:
Drawing from recent contributions to the understanding of the complex osmosis between writers’ lives and their textual personas, this essay analyzes life-writing theory and literature in contemporary Romania, with an emphasis on hybrid... more
Drawing from recent contributions to the understanding of the complex osmosis between writers’ lives and their textual personas, this essay analyzes life-writing theory and literature in contemporary Romania, with an emphasis on hybrid genres and on concepts that call into question the divide between the biographical and the literary. Among such concepts, I dwell primarily on biofiction. Having received considerable attention of late in our theory commons, notably from scholars like Michael Lackey and Lucia Boldrini, the notion and attendant practices hold a pivotal role in the work of the Romanian writers I examine in this essay.
Looking back from the perspective of the contemporary boom in biofiction studies, it might seem easy to disregard the difficulties that hybrid genres such as biofiction and autofiction initially posed at a conceptual level. This is why I open my argument with a theoretical genealogy of bio-literary hybridity in Romania. The case studies I start from – Eugen Simion, Mircea Martin, Adrian Marino – are theorists of life-writing who engaged across the Iron Curtain with French models of authorship, particularly Barthes’s, in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes anticipating Western insights, as Eugen Simion does in his 1981 book The Return of the Author, which prefigures some of the arguments developed in impactful studies by Seán Burke (1992) and Dominique Maingueneau (2006).
I then move to the 2000s, a decade that saw the crystallization of hybrid genres in Romania, including genres like “critifiction” (a term borrowed by Simona Popescu from Raymond Federman), which turns theory into a pretext for lived experience, “mistifiction” (a concept simultaneously coined by Christian Moraru and Mircea Anghelescu), which covers phenomena from forgery to postmodern play, and of course autofiction, whose evolution from pre-revolutionary to post-revolutionary forms I briefly trace.
Finally, in my last section I engage with contemporary writer Ion Iovan’s complex biofictional experiments centered on Mateiu Caragiale, an eccentric and mysterious figure of Romanian modernism. I analyze the nostalgic metatextual resonances between Caragiale’s writings and Iovan’s apocryphal (or heterobiographical) reconstruction of his voice, the metaleptical trompe l’oeil that Iovan stages by introducing fictional characters into the storyworld inhabited by their author, and the impact of such elaborate play on the shifts in Caragiale’s own canonical status.
Looking back from the perspective of the contemporary boom in biofiction studies, it might seem easy to disregard the difficulties that hybrid genres such as biofiction and autofiction initially posed at a conceptual level. This is why I open my argument with a theoretical genealogy of bio-literary hybridity in Romania. The case studies I start from – Eugen Simion, Mircea Martin, Adrian Marino – are theorists of life-writing who engaged across the Iron Curtain with French models of authorship, particularly Barthes’s, in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes anticipating Western insights, as Eugen Simion does in his 1981 book The Return of the Author, which prefigures some of the arguments developed in impactful studies by Seán Burke (1992) and Dominique Maingueneau (2006).
I then move to the 2000s, a decade that saw the crystallization of hybrid genres in Romania, including genres like “critifiction” (a term borrowed by Simona Popescu from Raymond Federman), which turns theory into a pretext for lived experience, “mistifiction” (a concept simultaneously coined by Christian Moraru and Mircea Anghelescu), which covers phenomena from forgery to postmodern play, and of course autofiction, whose evolution from pre-revolutionary to post-revolutionary forms I briefly trace.
Finally, in my last section I engage with contemporary writer Ion Iovan’s complex biofictional experiments centered on Mateiu Caragiale, an eccentric and mysterious figure of Romanian modernism. I analyze the nostalgic metatextual resonances between Caragiale’s writings and Iovan’s apocryphal (or heterobiographical) reconstruction of his voice, the metaleptical trompe l’oeil that Iovan stages by introducing fictional characters into the storyworld inhabited by their author, and the impact of such elaborate play on the shifts in Caragiale’s own canonical status.
Research Interests:
Si elle relève en première instance de la littérature, la biofiction prend pour point de départ une biographie réelle. Elle est sous-tendue par ce que Colm Tóibín a récemment appelé « l’imagination ancrée », qui confère au récit... more
Si elle relève en première instance de la littérature, la biofiction prend pour point de départ une biographie réelle. Elle est sous-tendue par ce que Colm Tóibín a récemment appelé « l’imagination ancrée », qui confère au récit fictionnel une crédibilité ambiguë touchant parfois à la duplicité. Mais que signifie ce genre en tant que vecteur de fabrication de mondes ? Ce boom des récits qui rejouent un passé réel, projetant sur lui un regard contemporain, est-il seulement un signe que nous cherchons à élaborer une image cohérente du monde des siècles passés ou s’agit-il plutôt d’une tentative de donner forme à une nouvelle manière de voir et/ou de se situer dans le présent ? Davantage, favorise-t-il de nouvelles conceptions et enseigne-t-il de nouvelles leçons pour l’avenir ?
A la lumière des théories relatives à la littérature mondiale développées par David Damrosch, Theo D’haen et d’autres, et utilisant la méthode de T. O. Beebee consistant dans une exploration de dynamiques transnationales à partir d’un domaine déterminé (en l’occurrence, un genre), nous proposons plusieurs perspectives complémentaires dans l’examen de la Biofiction comme Littérature mondiale : sa capacité de représentation trans-culturelle (manifeste dans des romans comme Gertrude de Hassan Najmi, dans lequel l’auteur portraiture une figure célèbre d’une autre aire culturelle), ses liens forts avec la mémoire culturelle (qui apparaît dans les romans à clefs de l’entre-deux-guerres, dans les expérimentations de Woolf et Schwob et plus loin encore au XIXe siècle), son adaptabilité protéenne (dont témoigne son mélange d’éléments modernistes et post-modernistes), son attrait pour le grand public (parfois sous la forme de biopics), sa faculté à toucher des enjeux sociaux et politiques (dans les oeuvres de Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, et de nombreux autres) ou à affecter les normes touchant au genre (dans les fictions de Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), ses développements dans des espaces étrangers à l’Occident (avec les œuvres de Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), et sa capacité à nourrir les débats internationaux. Il s’agit là de quelques-uns des traits par lesquels ce genre témoigne des évolutions littéraires à l’échelle mondiale.
Pour découvrir plus de détails sur notre approche et/ ou pour participer au dialogue, veuillez consulter notre site web:
https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/la-biofiction-comme-litterature-mondiale/argumentaire
Nous accueillons des propositions de communications de 20 minutes (300 mots), ainsi que des propositions de sessions (300 mots pour le descriptif général, tout comme pour chacun des trois exposés inclus).
Les résumés, accompagnés d'une note biographique d'environ 150 mots pour chaque participant, seront à envoyer à biofiction@kuleuven.be.
Date limite pour la remise des propositions: le 15 avril 2020
A la lumière des théories relatives à la littérature mondiale développées par David Damrosch, Theo D’haen et d’autres, et utilisant la méthode de T. O. Beebee consistant dans une exploration de dynamiques transnationales à partir d’un domaine déterminé (en l’occurrence, un genre), nous proposons plusieurs perspectives complémentaires dans l’examen de la Biofiction comme Littérature mondiale : sa capacité de représentation trans-culturelle (manifeste dans des romans comme Gertrude de Hassan Najmi, dans lequel l’auteur portraiture une figure célèbre d’une autre aire culturelle), ses liens forts avec la mémoire culturelle (qui apparaît dans les romans à clefs de l’entre-deux-guerres, dans les expérimentations de Woolf et Schwob et plus loin encore au XIXe siècle), son adaptabilité protéenne (dont témoigne son mélange d’éléments modernistes et post-modernistes), son attrait pour le grand public (parfois sous la forme de biopics), sa faculté à toucher des enjeux sociaux et politiques (dans les oeuvres de Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, et de nombreux autres) ou à affecter les normes touchant au genre (dans les fictions de Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), ses développements dans des espaces étrangers à l’Occident (avec les œuvres de Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), et sa capacité à nourrir les débats internationaux. Il s’agit là de quelques-uns des traits par lesquels ce genre témoigne des évolutions littéraires à l’échelle mondiale.
Pour découvrir plus de détails sur notre approche et/ ou pour participer au dialogue, veuillez consulter notre site web:
https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/la-biofiction-comme-litterature-mondiale/argumentaire
Nous accueillons des propositions de communications de 20 minutes (300 mots), ainsi que des propositions de sessions (300 mots pour le descriptif général, tout comme pour chacun des trois exposés inclus).
Les résumés, accompagnés d'une note biographique d'environ 150 mots pour chaque participant, seront à envoyer à biofiction@kuleuven.be.
Date limite pour la remise des propositions: le 15 avril 2020
Research Interests:
Biofiction (literature that takes a real biography as its point of departure) is powered by what Colm Tóibín has recently called “the anchored imagination”, which grants the fictional narrative a certain ambiguous (almost duplicitous)... more
Biofiction (literature that takes a real biography as its point of departure) is powered by what Colm Tóibín has recently called “the anchored imagination”, which grants the fictional narrative a certain ambiguous (almost duplicitous) credibility. But what do biographical novels mean as world-making vehicles? Is the recent boom in stories that rely on the real past, yet project contemporary visions upon it, only a sign that we are trying to build a coherent world-image of centuries past, or is it also an attempt to bring into being a new way of seeing and/or being in the present? Furthermore, does it foster new visions and teach new lessons for the future?
In the light of theories of World Literature proposed by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and others, and using T. O. Beebee’s method of starting from particular areas (in this case, a genre) in our exploration of transnational dynamics, we propose several complementary angles for conceptualizing Biofiction as World Literature: biofiction’s capacity of cross-cultural representation (manifested in novels like Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude, where a writer portrays a famous figure from another cultural area), its world-shaping imagery (detectable in biofictions of explorers, translators, and other cosmopolitan figures), its strong link with cultural memory (which can be traced back to the interwar versions of the roman à clef, to Woolf’s and Schwob’s experiments, and even further back into the mid-nineteenth century), its protean adaptability (seen in its mixture of modernist and postmodernist elements), its appeal to large audiences (sometimes in the form of biopics), its power to address social and political issues (in the works of Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many others) or shifting gender norms (in fictions by Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), its parallel developments across wide spaces and far beyond the West (with the work of Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), and its ability to fuel international theoretical debates. These are just some of the aspects that recommend this genre as a lens for analyzing world-spanning literary developments.
If you are interested in more details about our approach and/or you would like to contribute to the dialogue, please consult our website: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers
You can send 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers or proposals for panels (including a 300-word cover statement and three 300-word abstracts) to the following email address: biofiction@kuleuven.be. Please include a brief bio note for each speaker (around 150 words).
Deadline for submissions: 15th of April 2020
In the light of theories of World Literature proposed by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and others, and using T. O. Beebee’s method of starting from particular areas (in this case, a genre) in our exploration of transnational dynamics, we propose several complementary angles for conceptualizing Biofiction as World Literature: biofiction’s capacity of cross-cultural representation (manifested in novels like Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude, where a writer portrays a famous figure from another cultural area), its world-shaping imagery (detectable in biofictions of explorers, translators, and other cosmopolitan figures), its strong link with cultural memory (which can be traced back to the interwar versions of the roman à clef, to Woolf’s and Schwob’s experiments, and even further back into the mid-nineteenth century), its protean adaptability (seen in its mixture of modernist and postmodernist elements), its appeal to large audiences (sometimes in the form of biopics), its power to address social and political issues (in the works of Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many others) or shifting gender norms (in fictions by Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), its parallel developments across wide spaces and far beyond the West (with the work of Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), and its ability to fuel international theoretical debates. These are just some of the aspects that recommend this genre as a lens for analyzing world-spanning literary developments.
If you are interested in more details about our approach and/or you would like to contribute to the dialogue, please consult our website: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers
You can send 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers or proposals for panels (including a 300-word cover statement and three 300-word abstracts) to the following email address: biofiction@kuleuven.be. Please include a brief bio note for each speaker (around 150 words).
Deadline for submissions: 15th of April 2020
Research Interests:
This article builds on a reading of four novels which fictionalise various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s life: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2008), and Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister... more
This article builds on a reading of four novels which fictionalise various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s life: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2008), and Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister (2014), and Norah Vincent’s Adeline (2015). Using scenes or techniques from these novels as examples, I develop the binary opposition between authenticity (fidelity to facts) and what Ina Schabert called ‘poetic essentiality’ (fidelity to character) into a four-fold system of oppositions, trying to prove that the accurate use of facts and the loyal representation of personality are neither always in conjunction nor always opposed. Thus, I propose four categories instead of two: creative inaccuracy (slightly straying from the facts in order to better convey character), delusive inaccuracy (straying from the facts in such a way that what we know of Woolf’s character is altered in the fictional representation), delusive accuracy (invoking the facts without error, but assembling them in such a way as to convey the character misleadingly), and creative accuracy (inventing, but within the limits of the facts, especially applied to fantasizing dialogues, fleshing out scenes that were only schematic in the documents). Although examples from one of the four novels are used for each of the four categories, I argue that none of the strategies is employed exclusively by any novelist, which is why I conclude with a second table, depicting the connection between the four features as a continuum rather than a set of oppositions.
Research Interests:
Given that biofiction names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, some have treated this form of literature as biography. But authors of biofiction use rather than represent the lives of actual people, so it is inaccurate to... more
Given that biofiction names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, some have treated this form of literature as biography. But authors of biofiction use rather than represent the lives of actual people, so it is inaccurate to treat biofiction as a form of biography. The papers in this panel will examine responsible and irresponsible usages of actual lives and they will clarify some of the aesthetic objectives of biographical novelists.
Research Interests: Spanish Literature, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Postmodernism, and 12 moreContemporary Literature, Historical Jesus, Postmodernism (Literature), Postmodern Literature, Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Henry James, Life Writing (Literature), Postmodern, Biography and Life-Writing, Jesus, Jesus Christ, and Biofiction
This review discusses the merits of Lackey's edited book, focusing on the forms of truth that biofiction brings into being when it questions or complements the historical narrative, on the reasons for the recent biofiction boom, and on... more
This review discusses the merits of Lackey's edited book, focusing on the forms of truth that biofiction brings into being when it questions or complements the historical narrative, on the reasons for the recent biofiction boom, and on the social conditions that made it possible. I also address the implications of author interviews as a method when it comes to redefining the place of authorship, as well as the role of such works in exploring the branching out of postmodern fiction into different genres.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This Call for Papers invites contributions about Life-Writing works (including autofiction and biofiction) by and/or about women from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, with a special focus on the twentieth century. More info here:... more
This Call for Papers invites contributions about Life-Writing works (including autofiction and biofiction) by and/or about women from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, with a special focus on the twentieth century.
More info here:
http://www.dacoromanialitteraria.inst-puscariu.ro/en/np10.php
More info here:
http://www.dacoromanialitteraria.inst-puscariu.ro/en/np10.php
Research Interests:
Our conference programme is online now (https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/programme) and registration is open until the end of July. Please register at your earliest convenience so we can plan accordingly.