A Symposium
Thursday 26 June 2025
(Online)
Call for Presentations (deadline 23 March 2025)
Programme (will be added in April)
Register to attend (registrations will open in April 2025)
Keynote:
Barbara Carnevali, with Rachel Cusk and Josh Cohen
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, Outline)
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, The Private Life)
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” 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”.
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 togive “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”.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Along with traditional critical papers, we invite alternative forms of contributions, including flash presentations, digital posters, creative work in progress, and other original formats. We welcome presentations by scholars and practitioners at any stage of their careers. For more details, please see the Call for Presentations.
For any inquiries, please contact us at CCL@gold.ac.uk (please include the words “Auto/bio/fiction: Epics…” in the subject line).
