Event Series: Auto / Bio / Fiction

Convened by Lucia Boldrini (Goldsmiths), Natasha Bell (Goldsmiths) and Lucia Claudia Fiorella (University of Udine, Italy)

Dissolved boundaries of a multiplied self. Based on a painting by Alvaro Danti

The exponential multiplication of texts described by the relatively recent critical terms Biofiction and Autofiction is often associated with postmodernism and its aftermath – the attention to the instability of the category of the ‘real’, the questioning of the confines of the self, the construction, and not just representation, of the subject in writing and through narrative.

However, the critical reflection on these literary forms has led to the expansion of their formal, generic, historical span and to the examination of the role that autofictional and biofictional texts can acquire in exploring aesthetic, ethical, political, philosophical concerns central to their different times and cultures.

Their liminality, their relationship with proper names, their imbrication, fusion and confusion of person and character, their search for (and perhaps rejection of) selves defined as and through others, the reflection and dissolving of the boundaries of the self, their inquiry into what is a life, its edges, confines and centre(s), the radical difference and the confluence of Autofiction and Biofiction will be some of the questions we set out to explore.

Started in Autumn 2022 and continuing through this academic year (and, we hope, beyond), Auto / Bio / Fiction will include talks, seminars, roundtables, readings, reading groups, book launches and live book reviews and aims to put in dialogue (and possibly in dispute) different interpretations and practices of biofiction, autofiction and neighbouring genres and art forms, and discuss the questions raised by these forms and their critical and textual encounters.

Programme, 2023-24

(Click here if you want to see the 2022-23 programme and watch the video recordings of the seminars)

19 October 2023, 17:30 BST (online)

Alexandra Effe, ‘Thinking (Im-)Possibilities: Probability Estimations and Cognitive Feedback Loops in Processing Autofiction’

Natasha Bell, ‘Autofiction and the Implied Author’

Read more about the speakers and their papers, and book to attend (or watch the recording after the event).

23 November 2023, 18:30 UTC (online) [note the later time]

Michael Newman, ‘From Portrait to Anti-Portrait: Facing the destruction of humanity’

Sarah Walker, ‘Writing the self in the expanded field: autofiction as a strategy in text-based visual art’

Read more about the speakers and their papers, and book to attend (or watch the recording after the event).

7 December 2023, 18:00 UTC (in person and online) (jointly with the Sing in Me, Muse series) [note different start time]

Nora Goldschmidt, ‘Before Biofiction’

Read more about the speaker and the talk, and book to attend (or watch the recording after the event).

11 January 2024, 17:30 UTC (online)

Guido Mazzoni, ‘Like everyone else. Annie Ernaux’s The Years’

Carole Sweeney, ‘Writing feminist philosophy: Annie Ernaux and Simone de Beauvoir’

Read more about the speakers and their papers and book to attend (or watch the recording after the event).

8 February 2024, 17:30 UTC (online)

Alexandre Gefen,  ‘Philosophies of Biofiction’

Zoey Forbes, (title TBC)

Read more about the speakers and their papers and book to attend (or watch the recording after the event).

7 March 2024, 17:30 UTC (online)

Maaheen Ahmed, ‘Representations of children in autobiographical and autofictional graphic novels’

Elisabetta Varalda, ‘Virginia Woolf’s life in images and words’

Read more about the speakers and their papers and book to attend (or watch the recording after the event).

27 June 2024 (online), Auto / Bio / Fictional Graphic Narratives: A Symposium

Life-writing in its many forms, including autofiction and biofiction, has grown exponentially in recent decades. Comics and graphic narratives have similarly become widespread and respected literary genres that feature many biographical, autobiographical, autofictional or biofictional texts. Completing our 2023-24 Auto / Bio / Fiction series, this online symposium will reflect on the combination of these two forms in order to explore how auto / bio / fictional graphic narratives and comics mobilise – and may put in tension – the visual and the verbal, the individual and the collective, the historical and the fictional, the documentary and the imagined, as well as popular culture and ‘serious’ literary fiction in constructing historical lives with varying degrees of fictionality and purposes. Find out more about the symposium…


The organisers

Natasha Bell is an author and PhD student at Goldsmiths. Through practice-led research, she’s exploring the purpose and ethics of autofictional examinations of the writing self. Her novels This Nowhere Place (2021) and His Perfect Wife (2018) are published by Penguin, and she teaches Creative Writing for City Lit and Jericho Writers.

Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature. She is the author of Biografie fittizie e personaggi storici: (Auto)biografia, soggettività, teoria nel romanzo inglese contemporaneo (Pisa: ETS, 1998), Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012) and as editor, Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, with Julia Novak (2017). She is the President of the International Comparative Literature Association, and with Michael Lackey and Monica Latham she edits the Bloomsbury Biofiction Series.

Lucia Claudia Fiorella is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Udine, Italy. Her research focuses on postcolonial literature and on auto/biographism. Her publications include a book on representations of evil in J.M. Coetzee (Figure del Male nella narrativa di  J.M. Coetzee, 2006) and Oltre il patto autobiografico. Da Barthes a Coetzee [Beyond the Autobiographical Pact: From Barthes to Coetzee] Artemide, 2020).