Thursday 26 June 2025
An online Symposium
Call for Presentations
Download the CfP (PDF, 202KB)
He was describing […] what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was. (Cusk, 239-40)
The desire to express your pure, naked self, to bring it into the light of day, can only end in frustration, in the feeling that what you most wanted to show remains in the dark. (Cohen, 203)
Cusk’s words, frequently quoted as an encapsulation of the “Outline” trilogy project, suggest the quest for a structure that can accommodate the self and all its fragments; Cohen’s highlight the “irresolvable paradox” (117) of wanting to expose and share our most private selves but being unable to do so, and recall Winnicott’s suggestion that creativity stems from parts of ourselves that must remain hidden: “In the artist […] one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found” (189).
That narrative gives shape to the fragments of memory, of documents and of archives has become a given of historiography as much as of life-writing – whether biography, autobiography, autofiction, biofiction, or any form around and in-between those; but Cusk’s and Cohen’s words suggest something more, the search for some external, formal and intertextual structures to give a shape, an outline, to the murky darkness that resides in us and in other selves. This recalls T. S. Eliot’s contention, in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) that Joyce made recourse to the epic form of the Odyssey to give “a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” and to make “the modern world possible for art” (177–78).
Surely, trying to express a self – one’s own or someone else’s – does seem like an epic project to take on, perhaps even a foolish one, as Don Quijote’s taking on of the epic was. Or does the epic cloak provide a legitimacy to the otherwise singularly inward-looking (for some even narcissistic) project of autofiction, or the somewhat dubious morality of appropriating another’s story in the project of biofiction? Or is the recent boom of autofiction and biofiction simply the latest stage in the long history of the evolution of literary form, both a culmination of and an overcoming of the hegemony of the novel, both an intensification of and a challenge to the individualism of modernity?
Bakhtin and Lukács famously distinguished epic and novel as belonging to different epochs, social structures and ontologies. For both, the epic would be the genre of the past, closed, complete, almost timeless, in which the divine, the human and the physical orders are part of an organic totality, and the novel would be the genre of modernity, in which the world has lost its plenitude and intrinsic coherence and is in a constant state of becoming. The novel’s structure, then, is for Lukács patterned on the individual biography – and the novel’s time, for Bakhtin, is that of the individual life, dis-integrated from society, always with an “unrealized surplus of humanness” (37) that the novel can never fully account for, leaving us on a permanent quest for meaning.
This is not a rigid opposition: if Bakhtin pointed out that the novel also existed in antiquity, the epic continues to find ways to re-enter and re-shape the course of the novel. We see this, for example, in the 17th century in Cervantes’s anti-epic, where Don Quixote’s failure to integrate is caused precisely by the heroic fantasy of epic integration, showing up not so much the Don’s madness but that of the society that surrounds him. We see it further in Henry Fielding’s “comic epic in prose” and in the epic scope of the 18th-century novel, with its frequent concern with the origins of the nation. And in the 20th century we see it perhaps most explicitly in Joyce’s Ulysses as the “epic of two races” (146), peopled by an epic range of characters, structured by its parallels to the Odyssey, but focused on the small-scale of a single ordinary day.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its conception of an organic cosmos whose inhabitants are however already individuals, was for Lukács the turning point from the world of the epic to that of the novel. Might we also see it as an early embodiment of the autofictional form (Charles Singleton’s famous statement that “the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not fiction” [62], comes to mind) as it simultaneously traces an individual and a collective story and unfolds a subject-in-progress as it forms and re-forms itself through its relational encounters with others? Perhaps it is even an autofiction containing within itself a myriad of small biofictions, as the poet tells the stories of the many historical individuals he encounters in the other world.
Neither biofiction nor autofiction are recent phenomena (Nora Goldschmidt has traced both forms back to antiquity), but they have acquired an increasingly central role in contemporary fiction, possibly signalling the culmination of the genre of the novel, or, possibly, carrying on, with regard to the novel, the work that the novel performed with regard to the epic. At the same time, they also seem to recover, rethink and re-adapt certain epic thematic and formal features (such as the structure of the journey, length, catalogues and seriality, range and quantity of characters, sociopolitical and cosmographic reflections) in order to tackle questions of identity, morality, sexuality, family relationships, history, warfare, mortality, the supernatural or extra-ordinary, the position of men and women in the world.
Sharing a common philosophical underpinning in the break with self-possessive individualism towards an intersubjective understanding of the self, autofictional and biofictional narratives nevertheless continue to explore the self in its reality and materiality, sometimes voiding it of essence while seeking to pinpoint precisely what it is that makes a subject a subject. They investigate (or grope in the dark for) the self’s quest for self-expression and probe its boundaries in relation to others. They negotiate the relation of individual and collective identities, of material and perceived world. They mediate the complex relationships of memory, history, experience and knowledge. They examine how selves are constructed textually and intertextually in the very act of writing. And in doing all this, they often acquire epic scale and scope, as in the self-centred (this is not meant negatively) work of Karl Ove Knausgård, the subject-emptying work of Rachel Cusk, the sociological take of Annie Ernaux’s autoethnography, the anti-illusionism of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, the historical-biofictional span of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, Deborah Levy’s project of “living autobiography”, the autotheoretical work of Maggie Nelson (the latter two also revisiting Montaigne’s essayification of the self, also epic in scale and scope), the exofiction of Philippe Vasset, or the heroizations and de-heroizations of the agonic schemas of sport biofiction (see Gelz).
We are delighted that our Symposium’s keynote lecture will be given by Professor Barbara Carnevali (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) on Rachel Cusk’s work; and that Rachel Cusk and Josh Cohen will respond to the lecture and will be in conversation with Carnevali on the forms and challenges of auto/bio/fiction.
We invite proposals for online presentations, which can include diverse formats such as:
- 20-minute formal papers
- 10-minute flash contributions
- digital posters (i.e., as in a conference poster session: the poster can be shown through screen share, with a 5-6 minute explanation)
- presentation of work in progress by practitioners
Topics may address (but are not limited to):
- epic or counter-epic forms of auto/bio/fictional writing, whether in scale, scope, tropes, themes, recurrent features and structures (catalogue, seriality, ekphrasis, heroism, the quest, katabasis and nekya, the agon, etc.);
- the tension between or confluence of novel, epic and other genres within auto/bio/fictional forms
- auto/biofictional quests for shape
- auto/bio/fiction and intertextual constructions of the subject
- material bodies, hidden/murky depths and auto/bio/fictional form
- auto/bio/fictional plenitude and emptiness
Comparisons across languages, cultures and traditions are most welcome.
Proposals are welcome from academics and practitioners at any stage of their career and should include:
- a summary of up to 250 words of the proposed contribution
- the type and length of the proposed contribution (e.g. formal paper, 20 minutes; flash contribution, 10 minutes)
- up to 8 keywords
- a short biography of up to 150 words
Please send your proposals by 23 March 2025 to: CCL@gold.ac.uk (please include the words “Auto/bio/fiction: epics…”in the subject line).
We expect to confirm acceptance by early April and publish a programme, abstracts and biographies by late April 2025.
This online symposium completes the 2024-25 Auto / Bio / Fiction series at the CCL and is organised by the series’ convenors, Natasha Bell, Lucia Boldrini and Claudia Fiorella.
For any inquiries, please contact us at CCL@gold.ac.uk (please include the words “Auto/bio/fiction: Epics…” in the subject line).
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Epic and Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson, U. of Texas P., 1981, 1-40.
Cohen, Josh, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark, Granta, 2014.
Cusk, Rachel, Outline, Vintage 2015.
Eliot, T.S., “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. F. Kermode, Faber, 1975, pp. 175-78.
Gelz, Andreas, “Biofiction and Sport”, in The Routledge Companion to Biofiction, ed. L. Boldrini, L. Cernat, A. Gefen, M. Lackey, Routledge 2025, 353-68.
Goldschmidt, Nora, Afterlives of the Roman Poets: Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry, Cambridge U. P., 2019.
Joyce, James, Letter to Carlo Linati, 21 Sept. 1920, in Letters, Vol I, ed. S. Gilbert, Viking, 1957, pp.146-47.
Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1916-20), trans. A. Bostock, Merlin Press, 1971.
Singleton Charles S., Dante’s Commedia: Elements of Structure (orig. pub. as Dante Studies 1, 1954), The Johns Hopkins U. P., 2109.
Winnicott, Donald W. “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” (1963), inReading Winnicott, ed. L. Caldwell and A. Joyce, Routledge, 2011.
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