The abstracts, followed by the speaker’s short biography, are in the order of presentation.
Panel 1
Panel 2
Panel 3
Keynote session
Panel 4
Panel 5
Panel 6
Panel 1: Auto/Bio/Fictional (Counter-)Epics of the Nation
Ankana Bag, ‘Looking at the Zeitgeist through Bio-fiction: Sei Somoy [Those Days] by Sunil Gangopadhyay’
The pre-Independent (canonised) history of the region known as ‘Bengal’ in the Indian subcontinent was marked by an era termed as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’. It spanned several decades from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. During this time, a number of social reforms were aimed to strengthen the foundation of the Bangla language by creating literatures using ‘modern’ literary forms like prose articles and novels. These literary genres were direct products of the imported colonial modernity and education. The colonial education system was also responsible for germinating the concept of ‘nation’ (among a section of colonially educated men) and the aspect of nationalistic pride linked deeply with a community feeling with people across the land, ideologically manufactured to surpass geographical or social differences.
Bengali novelist, poet and critic Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel Sei Somoy (1997) usually translated in English as ‘Those Days’, encapsulates the ethos of the mid-late nineteenth century and posits that very ethos as the true protagonist of the text. While the novel expresses this zeitgeist through a particular fictional character drawn upon a historical figure, many other characters throughout the text are prominent individuals who left their mark on the histories that are essential to understand the conflicting currents of thoughts and movements of that time. This paper will delve into how the plethora of bio-fictions of figures such as Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Radhakanta Deb, Rupchand Pakshi, David Hare and John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune portray the nation and national literature as emergent categories in the Bengali sensibility through a novel that is ‘epical’ in its polyphonic scope.
Ankana Bag is presently pursuing Ph.D at Centre for Comparative Literature, Visva-Bharati, West Bengal, India. She completed her M.Phil in Comparative Literature in 2020. She has presented papers in several seminars including the ACLA Annual Meeting in 2021, the 7th Biennial International e-Conference of JSA-ASEAN in 2021, a conference by the Research Scholars’ Forum, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University in 2023, as well as the biennial CLAI conference in 2024. The broad area of her research consists of Bangla travel writings authored during nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is learning Japanese, qualifying for multiple levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). She is also learning Korean. Her interests are focused on East-Asian popular culture and literature.
Chloe Green, ‘“Another Epic Poem”: André Dao’s Autofictional Epic of Memory’
In Vietnamese-Australian André Dao’s autofictional novel Anam (2023), the narrator recounts an event in which Vietnamese and Western modes of nationalism collide. In this event, recounted from historian Ngo Vinh Long’s Before the Revolution, Long encounters a Henry Kissinger freshly returned from Vietnam, and when he attempts to counter Kissinger’s misinformed understandings of Vietnamese national ideology, his words are dismissed as just “another epic poem” (Dao 92). In this presentation, I aim to explore how Dao’s novel negotiates individual and collective identity within two generic contexts which might seem incompatible: that of autofiction and that of the epic. His novel positions autofiction as an epic project, one that is uniquely suited for telling the story of his dispossessed family, their migrations, and their ambivalent attachment to the past. In attempting to write the epic of Anam, the term Dao uses to designate a nation composed of nostalgia, memory, and revisionist history, it argues for a temporally-mobile understanding of nation and place, in which “memories of a future home” take the place of a stable or undisturbed homeland (Dao 91). I will discuss how, as Dao’s novel weaves together personal reflection with analysis of the political forces that shaped his family’s exile from Vietnam, its concern with the national epic expands the of-assumed narrow remit of autofiction. If Anam is an impossible nation, growing out of memories of a lost past into an unimagined future, then Dao’s novel proposes an impossible epic, one that can occur on the scale of autofiction.
Dr Chloe Green is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. She has published widely in the fields of the medical humanities, life writing, and autofiction, and her monograph, Writing Contested Illness: Experimentation in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2025.
Panel 2: (Counter-)Epic Constructions of the Self
Dominique Faria, ‘Unmaking the Hero: Counter-Epic Biofictions of the Father in Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Personneand Hélène Gaudy’s Archipels’
This paper examines two contemporary French texts — Personne by Gwenaëlle Aubry and Archipels by Hélène Gaudy — as counter-epic biofictions. Both works revolve around elusive father figures, whose lives resist the coherence, linearity, and grandeur associated with traditional biographical or epic narratives. Rather than glorifying these men, Aubry and Gaudy confront their fallibility, eccentricity, and fragmentation at moments of profound loss: Gaudy’s unconventional father is rendered unreachable by age-related cognitive decline, while Aubry’s struggles with psychiatric illness and social marginality culminate in his suicide. In both cases, the authors craft narratives that actively de-heroize their father, challenging the authority of unified identity. The fathers’ own fragmentation and eccentricity necessitate a departure from conventional narrative form, prompting the authors to adopt non-linear structures and intertextual experimentation. Aubry arranges her narrative into twenty-six alphabetically ordered fragments, a paradoxical attempt to impose structure on familial chaos; Gaudy constructs her account through catalogues and lists, weaving a memory-driven narrative from her father’s writings and belongings. A pivotal intertext for both is Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance, cited in each work’s epigraph and echoed throughout. Through these formally inventive approaches, Aubry and Gaudy reject narrative coherence in favour of a more intimate, fragmented mode of life writing — one that recentres grief, uncertainty, and the unstable boundaries between self and other.
Dominique Faria is Associate Professor at the University of the Azores (Portugal), where she coordinates the Doctoral Programme in Island Literatures and Cultures and the Master’s in Translation. She is a researcher at CHAM – Centre for the Humanities (FCSH – NOVA / University of the Azores), Vice-President of the Portuguese Association for French Studies (APEF), and Editor-in-Chief of Carnets, online journal of French studies. Holding a PhD in French Literature, her research interests include contemporary French fiction, translation, and island literature. She is the author of Des îles de papier. Approches littéraires des espaces insulaires dans la fiction française contemporaine (2000–2024) (in press, Classiques Garnier). She has edited Reframing Translators, Translators as Reframers (Routledge, 2023), with Marta Pacheco Pinto and Joana Moura; Aviateurs-Écrivains, témoins de l’Histoire, with José Domingues de Almeida, Fátima Outeirinho, and António Monteiro (Le Manuscrit, 2017); and Pensée de l’archipel et lieux de passage (Éditions Petra, 2016).
Paula Alexandra Guimarães, ‘Myths and Shapes of the Self in the Nineteenth-Century Poetic/Epic Narrative: Auto-Fiction, Inter(para)textuality, and the (De)construction of Identity’
The idea of the self, as a free and autonomous entity, and its construction and development (as Bildung and Ausbildung), has emerged with the advent of Romanticism, but its centred and intense focus on the individual (bios) was in reality fraught with doubt, instability and fracture.
This paper aims at showing how the poets of this specific period – the 1800s – gradually devise new ways of both affirming and disguising/contesting the Self in their longer poetic narratives. Here, they create new forms or shapes of themselves, namely by readapting the traditional public epic to personal purposes, and by auto-fictionalising their own experience and that of the nation, which are both shown to be in crisis.
While Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Byron’s Child Harold develop the intricacies of the inner and outer quest or ’journey’ of their selves (a Bildungsweg), S. T. Coleridge creates his own fiction of the fragmented text and speaker, which is also present in Mary Shelley’s prototypical narratives of her (de)creation myth, Frankenstein. In turn, Victorian poets such as Tennyson and the Brownings diversely shaped and recreated the modern epic of the self and the nation in their works; either through a cloaked/dramatised transposition to a medieval/early modern male legend (Idylls of the King), or a more progressive first-person feminocentric retelling (Aurora Leigh).
The paper thus concludes that these (auto)biographical profiles, shapes and types imagined by those writers are not only (inter) and (para)textually constructed, but they are also ‘automythographies’ as they reflect their own century’s increased quest for new (fictionalised) identities, in many ways paving the way for the (de)construction of identity in the modernnovel.
Paula Alexandra Guimarães is an Associate Professor of English Studies at the University of Minho, Braga (Portugal). She wrote her MA dissertation on Elizabeth Gaskell’s social novels (1995) and her PhD thesis on the poetry of the Brontë sisters (2002), with research periods at the Universities of Leeds and London. She was a member of the Board of APEAA and Director of the European Languages and Literatures Courses, at the School of Arts and Humanities. She coordinated a national research group (IntCultPoet) at the Centre for Humanistic Studies and organized several conferences, seminars and lectures. She presented papers in about 60 scientific meetings, in Portugal and abroad, and she participated in Erasmus exchange programs at Manchester Metropolitan and Cardiff universities. Her research interests are: Poetry and poetics, gender studies, nineteenth-century English culture, Anglo-Portuguese studies, and creative writing. She published widely, namely a book on Intercultural Poetics: Literary Representations of the Foreign Other (2019, CEHUM/Húmus) and in Comparative Critical Studies. She is the present Head of the Department of English and North-American Studies and the Director of the Masters in English Language, Literature and Culture.
Panel 3: Auto/Bio/Fictional Embodiment and the Shape(lessness) of a Self
Stephanie Ng, ‘Elided Selves and Discredited Speech: Gendered Politics of Self-Representation in Autofiction’
My paper reads Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only to investigate the tension between self-knowledge, legibility, and erasure in autofiction, identifying ways in which the novels’ protagonists narrate themselves into further obscurity. Faye, Cusk’s autofictional alter-ego, manufactures her own effacement by retreating into silence, facilitating conversations with other characters and relaying their introspective insights to the reader. This subversion of the first-person framework mirrors Faye’s departure from the cadences of bourgeois normativity. Yet, despite her attempt to disrupt expectations – to be free of stylistic and good life conventions – she continues to occupy the rigidly intelligible role of a woman by virtue of embodying the self-effacing care work historically foisted on her gender. In contrast, Hjorth’s Ida compulsively over-discloses, seeking validation for a past trauma through testimony. Her speech is actively rejected, recast as hysteria by a counter-novel that reframes the protagonist as an unstable, unreliable individual. That Faye’s self-effacement is passively absorbed into the social order while Ida’s narration is, at best, misread or, at worst, discredited bespeaks a gendered bias in women’s autofiction: acceptable – even palatable – when, on both representational and formal levels, the novel reproduces the cultural expectation of feminine restraint. Whether by her own design in the case of Faye or through the delegitimization of her experiences in that of Ida, both (self-)absented protagonists are rendered legible only insofar as they conform to entrenched cultural scripts of feminine subjecthood. Both texts challenge the assumption that autofictional self-representation can serve as a means of self-possession. In both of these autofictional texts, the quest for shape amounts to intersubjective negotiation that skews towards the external perception of a life.
Stephanie Ng holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from UCL. Her project developed several conceptualizations of compromise: an affective atmosphere tinged with resignation; a mode of weathering the slow deterioration of the good life fantasy; a core, conventionalizing tenet of liberal democracy; an aesthetic hybridity that further impedes political imagination; and, finally, a means of testing a new matrix of familial belonging. It adopted a gendered lens through which to investigate why women who by all legal accounts qualify as full-fledged citizens continually find themselves making choices that approximate bargaining.
Sushree Routray, ‘Maternal Ambivalence and Matrescence in Zehra Naqvi’s The Reluctant Mother’
In her memoir The Reluctant Mother, Zehra Naqvi offers a raw and unfiltered account of the complexities of early motherhood, challenging the idealized maternal scripts that often dominate public and literary discourse. Her narrative foregrounds maternal ambivalence—the coexistence of love and resentment, fulfillment and loss—thereby resisting the notion of motherhood as an unproblematic or wholly joyous state. Naqvi’s work exemplifies what Adrienne Rich termed the “split subjectivity” of motherhood, in which the mother negotiates her sense of self against the overwhelming demands of caregiving.
This paper situates The Reluctant Mother within the framework of auto/bio/fiction’s engagement with epic and counter-epic forms, examining how Naqvi’s memoir reconfigures the maternal journey as a psychological and existential odyssey. Drawing on the concept of matrescence—a term first introduced by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the transitional period of becoming a mother—this paper explores how Naqvi’s narrative gives shape to the often-invisible transformations of maternal identity. The memoir, with its intimate confessions and refusals of normative motherhood, becomes a counter-epic, resisting the glorification of maternal sacrifice and instead portraying motherhood as a site of rupture, negotiation, and self-reconstruction.
By weaving personal memory with broader sociocultural expectations of motherhood, Naqvi’s work aligns with contemporary autofictional tendencies that blur the boundaries between personal testimony and literary self-construction. This paper argues that The Reluctant Mother does not merely recount the maternal experience but actively interrogates it, using the narrative structure to expose the dissonance between the mythic maternal ideal and the embodied maternal reality. Through this, Naqvi’s memoir not only contributes to the evolving discourse on maternal ambivalence but also exemplifies the ways in which auto/bio/fictional writing serves as both a site of resistance and a space for reimagining the maternal self.
Sushree Routray is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. Her research interests include Motherhood Studies, Feminist Phenomenology, Trans Narratives and South Asian Literature. Her work has been published in journals like Asian Studies Review, Louisiana State University Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Women’s Studies International Forum amongst others.
Keynote session
Barbara Carnevali, “Oneself as Others. On Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy”, followed by Josh Cohen in Conversation with Rachel Cusk and Barbara Carnevali
Rachel Cusk’s autofictional style is characterized by a radical decentering of the self. Instead of foregrounding her subjectivity, Cusk’s narrator, Faye, assumes a unique role as a listener and interviewer. This role allows the voices and stories of others to take center stage. The self is constructed not through direct confession or introspection but through commentary, comparison, and echo. Faye’s identity, which emerges gradually, is an “outline” shaped by the narratives of those she encounters. This technique transforms autofiction from a genre characterized by egotism and self-expression into a literary practice where “saying I” becomes a way to narrate the lives of others. The self is understood only in relation to, and as a reflection of, the experiences and perspectives of others. The “I” is thus always also the other, and self-knowledge is achieved through the interplay of mirroring, commentary, and the refusal of narcissistic singularity.
Barbara Carnevali is Full Professor in Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy, and completed her training in the US (Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago) and in France (Post doc at the Sorbonne). She has been a fellow at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris and at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. She is a member of the European Journal of Philosophy editorial board, co-editor of the “Design/Théories” series of Les presses du Réel. scientific curator of the Italian Philosophy Festival and of the lecture series “Lo stato dell’Arte” in Venice. Her work is centred on “Social Aesthetics”, focusing on the relationship between social and aesthetic forms, interpreted through the study of the arts and phenomena that are mediated or constituted by appearance, sensitivity, and taste: reflexivity and self-presentation, recognition, prestige and distinction, rituals, lifestyles, fashion, the public sphere, and advertising. Another major part of her research focuses on philosophical modernity with particular interest in the tension between the self and society.
Barbara Carnevali is the author of Romanticism and Recognition: Rousseau and the Modern Self (French edition Geneva 2012, English translation forthcoming for Columbia University Press) and Social Appearances: A Philosophy of Display and Prestige (Columbia University Press, 2020). Her articles have appeared in several international journals such as Les Annales, Critique, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, and Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. She has just completed a book on the relationship between architecture, design, and politics in the city of Milan during the Italian post-war modernization (La Linea rossa, Feltrinelli, forthcoming).
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst and author, and was Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths until 2024. He is the author of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto Press, 1998); Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum, 2003); How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005); his more recent books – The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (Granta 2013); Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (Granta, 2019); How to Live. What to Do: How Great Novels Help Us Change (Ebury, 2021); Losers (Peninsula, 2021); and All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (Granta, 2024) – explore major contemporary issues like privacy, work, meritocracy and anger through the lenses of psychoanalysis, culture and personal experience. He regularly publishes reviews and essays in The Guardian, New Statesman, Economist/ 1843, Granta, Aeon and TLS.
Born in Canada and having lived in the US, Britain and now France, Rachel Cusk is the author of, among other books, Saving Agnes (1993, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award); The Country Life (1997, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award); A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001); Arlington Park (2006, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction); The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009); Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012); The Outline Trilogy, consisting of Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018), all three shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction as well as other prizes such as the Folio Prize, the Bailey’s prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction; Second Place (2021, winner of the Prix Femina étranger and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction), and Parade (2024, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize). Rachel Cusk has also been awarded the Premio Malaparte and the title of Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Panel 4: Auto/Bio/Fiction and the Digital Shapes of a Self
Annie Cheng, ‘Journaling with “Shakespeare”: Self-Writing Practices in the AI-Assisted Journal’
Journaling is a quotidian attempt at the “epic” project of writing the self. My research interrogates an emergent phenomena: AI-assisted journaling devices that emulate famous authors. Users submit their journals to chatbot versions of “Shakespeare,” “Marcus Aurelius,” or “Virginia Woolf” and in return, they receive interpretations, counseling, and prompting. What does this intervention do to self-writing — and to selfhood?
From the outset, these devices create biofictional simulacra of the authors that they emulate; the “authors” speak as automated assemblages of form, style, and biographical information that are invoked as therapeutic muses. In this way, they reconfigure an epic tradition of forming selfhood through relational encounters with the past. Furthermore, in receiving “interpretation” from the AI agents, users encounter fabrications — counterfactual lives, premature narrative closures, emotional untruths. Interacting with the messily machine-assembled self that results becomes an inherently speculative practice that echoes autofiction in its negotiation of the boundaries of subjectivity. The “shape” of a self thus emerges (or dissolves) in its strained dialogue with what the device cannot properly parse or contextualize.
In my experimental criticism, I interact with the devices using journal entries designed loosely around my own life, in order to trace how “introspection” evolves. For instance, how does self-distancing operate in these hyper-personalized (yet ultimately generalizing) interfaces? How does the recirculation of a person’s life through generated prompts affect their sense of temporality or narrative coherence? These questions are not only relevant to critiques of emerging technologies but also to perennial tensions within self-writing.
Annie Cheng (she/her) is an MPhil candidate in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, fully sponsored by the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship. She received her B.A. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2024 during which she conducted an award-winning undergraduate thesis on the anonymous writings of insane asylum patients in 19th-century America. As she pursues future doctoral research, she wants to continue investigating lineages of therapeutic writing, especially in dialogue with fluid or unstable notions of literary authorship. Her other primary research interests include interactive fiction, hypertexts, personal archives & self-archiving, and narrative medicine.
Max Shirley, ‘Networks of Confession: Digitality and Self-Expression’
With the expansion of distributed computing networks and mass communications technologies, the ways in which we express ourselves have inevitably transformed since Rita Felski published her seminal Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (1989). Where confessional and autobiographical literature was once viewed as engendering intersubjective discursive fields, network infrastructures now prioritise acts of communication over community (see Chun, 2021). Indeed, while we may be sharing more than ever, what we share about ourselves is largely dictated or shaped by algorithmic logic, and preferences plucked from dropdown boxes on social media sites. The epic project of self-expression has become a daily, digital ritual.
This paper intends to make a novel critical intervention by combining the study of life narratives with recent work on digital infrastructures. To do so, I take up Joanna Walsh’s autofictional text Girl Online: A User Manual (2022), which attends to the networked reality of our historical present and takes the form of a journey from the offline to the online realm. I argue that, through formal experimentation, Walsh critiques conventional forms of self-presentation to project a textual self that bypasses neoliberal society’s overwhelming preoccupation with the individual. Girl Online is littered with references to screens and interfaces, logic gates and algorithms, as Walsh outlines a mode of digital self-narration that is not delimited by the computer’s binary system of representation. Presumed authenticity ultimately gives way to artificiality in Walsh’s autofictional work as she journeys through various online personas or “I”s as part of her quest to escape the logic of capture that underpins network systems.
Max Shirley is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster in London. His research considers formal experimentation in literature and contemporary avant-garde aesthetics.
Panel 5: Intersubjective, Intersemiotic, Intertextual Quests for the Self
Nesrin Koç, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity: Olivia Laing’s Auto/Biofictionalization and Unfinalizability in Crudo”
In Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that for aesthetic activity to occur, the author must first apprehend the hero’s world axiologically from within, seeing the world as the hero sees it, before returning to their own position to consummate the image of the hero, to give it a final shape. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of shaping the hero and the various forms the author-hero relationship can take, this paper explores the implications of author- hero relationship in auto/biofictions through analysing Olivia Laing’s Crudo, a text which blurs the lines between novel and epic, fiction and non-fiction as well as auto and bio, as the self and the other merge. Laing is simultaneously the author writing about Kathy Acker and the hero, as it is her own life that is being voiced through Acker, epitomized in the novel’s opening line: “Kathy, by which I mean I.”
Through an analysis of the relationship between Laing as the author and her hero Kathy, herself an author, this paper explores how this auto/biofictional plenitude in Crudo unsettles the quest for a shape of the self by foregrounding the textual and intersubjective processes through which subjectivities are constructed. Framed as a non-fiction novel, Crudo, true to its title, is a “raw” narrative- one that inevitably gives a shape to a life through writing while at the same time resisting containment within any conventional literary form. As such, the epic quest for self-knowledge becomes a counter-epic: a pursuit that gestures toward meaning, a sense of totality and completeness, simultaneously pointing to its impossibility. Crudo’s rawness thus epitomizes the conflict at the heart of writing lives: The search for selves and their unfinalizability.
Dr. Nesrin Koç is a TÜBİTAK 2219 Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow at Bournemouth University and a faculty member at Mudanya University, Türkiye. She earned her PhD from Middle East Technical University in 2021 with her dissertation, “Reconstruction of Authorial Identity in Contemporary Author Fictions: A.S Byatt’s Possession, David Lodge’s Author, Author and Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan”. Tracing authors as characters, her research focuses on author fictions and reconstructive turn in literature. Her current project at Bournemouth supervised by Hywel Dix examines authorial self-positioning in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and Knife.
Nerida Woodhams Bertozzi, ‘“La regina del silenzio”: epic forms, ekphrasis and silent film in Melania Mazzucco’s Silenzio’
This paper considers certain epic thematic and formal features as they appear in Italian author Melania Mazzucco’s most recent biofictional novel, Silenzio. Le sette vite di Diana Karenne (Einaudi, 2024), which traces the life and career of the eponymous Polish silent film actress. It explores how these elements beyond performing a purely legitimising function in relation to the literary text become a means of interrogating the possibilities and limitations of the biofictional novel. First, the paper briefly considers a possible parallel between the historical, biographical, and literary enquête, and the epic forms of both katabasis and anabasis in Silenzio. The paper’s main focus, however, is the rhetorical device of ekphrasis as it relates to photography, painting, teatro di posa, and silent film in Mazzucco’s biofictional narrative. The hybrid textuality of Silenzio can be read both in terms of ekphrasis and the iconotext. Visual forms, especially the ekphrastic engagement with silent film, become a means of interrogating the language of narrative itself, and exploring the possibility of embodied, gesture-based approaches to narrative language. It is in this highly charged intersemiotic space that the biographical subject emerges (and a process of subjectification occurs). Ultimately, by way of these epic elements, this paper contends that a mythic dimension occurs in Mazzucco’s representation, which is essential to creating a universality and transhistorical dimension to the biographical subject. This is particularly significant in relation to the representation of a historically situated, gendered subject and related questions of agency and appropriation.
Nerida Woodhams Bertozzi is a first-year PhD candidate at the University of Bologna’s Department of Translating, Interpreting (Intercultural Studies curriculum). Her research interests focus primarily on contemporary Anglophone and Italian literature, adopting a comparative approach to issues of gender and genre in the biographical novel. Her thesis supervisors are Professors Raffaella Baccolini and Roberto Carnero. She is part of the research group “Autori, lettori, personaggi nella mediasfera dell’estremo contemporaneo” and the “Centro di Studi interdisciplinari sulla Mediazione e la Traduzione a opera di e per Ragazze/i (MeTRa)” at the University of Bologna.
Panel 6: Transgenerational, Transnational, Transmigrant (Counter-)Epic Selves
Massimiliano Manni, ‘The Unlikely Hero’s Autofictional Journey: Jonathan Safran Foer and Ocean Vuong’s Family, Self and Other in Language and Otherwise’
If, as Northrop Frye has it in Anatomy of Criticism, the epic mode pivots on a hero who is “superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment”, then most autofictional production by white men in the US qualifies as a counter-epic for its satirical, self-deprecating overtones (cf. Worthington 2018). More recently, however, the manifold affordances of autofiction have been leveraged by traditionally marginalised groups to undergird rather than undermine their social positioning, begging the question of how these opposing trends can square with a more elitist understanding of autofiction. By looking at Jonathan Safran Foer’s third-person magical realist autofiction Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and comparing it with the pseudo-epistolary On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by American-Vietnamese author Ocean Vuong, my paper aims to exemplify broad differences in formal practice and affect between two extremes of the autofictional spectrum. While in the former the implied author makes a mockery of the typical American hero, on a futile quest for origins in Ukraine that turns into myth-making, the latter traces the rise of the unlikely hero – refugee, gay and fatherless – who negotiates his place at the intersection between his dysfunctional birth family and his host country’s rough, conflicted love. Where Safran Foer turns an erasure in his family history into legend, Vuong founds a new language for bridging the gulf between apparently incompatible social groups, both of them showcasing autofiction’s potential in building cultural memory by repurposing the epics of old for a contemporary, more individual-oriented ethos.
Massimiliano Manni, PhD, is an independent researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Milan and the University of Brescia. With an MA in Specialized Translation and Conference Interpreting and a TEFL certification, he is also a freelance interpreter, translator and English as a Foreign Language teacher. His research interests focus on autofiction and life writing, drawing on English and comparative literature, genre theory and narratology, post- and metamodernism scholarship, queer and postcolonial studies.
Vasiliki Petsa, ‘A Seventh Man and Industrial Woman as epic auto/bio/fictional narratives of the transmigrant transclass’
Postwar Southern European labor migrants incarnate not only the figure of the mobile and multiply connected ‘transmigrant’ (Glick Schiller), but also, crucially and predominantly, a perennially transitional and unstable ‘transclass’ (Jaquet). Being a transmigrant transclass entails the disruption of social and cultural reproduction related to class and ethnicity, within conditions largely imposed by uneven geoeconomic structures, but also inflected by other identity traits, such as gender.
The social and existential ramifications of labor migration, which entails a condition of liminality on various fronts, have been grappled with by many cultural forms. The proposed announcement casts its focus on two cross-generic and multi-modal collaborative books, namely A Seventh Man (1975) by John Berger & Jean Mohr and Industrial Woman (1986) by Jas Duke, Vivienne Meher & Peter Lyssiotis, which offer mediated auto/bio/fictional narratives, engaging with post-war Mediterranean migration in Western Europe and Australia from an intersectional perspective. Both books combine, and alternate between, the documentary and the fictitious, the verbal and the visual, the personal and the public, individual and collective, fragmentation and cohesion, and embody multiple forms of temporality. A comparative examination of ASeventh Man and Industrial Woman will show how, by foregrounding constructedness and hybridity, both texts articulate versions of an auto/bio/fictional epic of the transmigrant transclass, albeit employing diverse formal and narrative strategies, based on the tropes of repetition with a difference and the ‘incommensurability of translation’ (Bhabha).
Vasiliki Petsa is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Thessaly, Greece, and PI of the project ‘Gender and Ethnicity in Greek Working-Class Literature’, funded by H.F.R.I. She is also a 2025 Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH) Fellow. She has conducted postdoctoral research on Greek working-class literature at the University of Crete and on Greek road and travel films at the University of the Peloponnese. Her PhD thesis dealt with political violence, cultural memory and trauma in Greek and Italian literatures. She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of the Peloponnese, the University of Ioannina, the University of the Aegean, the Hellenic Open University and the Open University of Cyprus.
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