Organisation : Alexandre Gefen , Alison James
With the support of the University of Chicago International Institute for Research in Paris (IIRP) and UMR Thalim/CNRS.
Life writing in the 21st century encompasses a large variety of literary approaches as well as visual media and amateur practices. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux in 2022 and the worldwide success of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Emmanuel Carrère highlight the inescapable presence of such writings in the contemporary literary field, whether in traditional forms such as autobiographical narratives and testimonies, or original ones: autofictions, biographical fictions, narratives of filiation, investigations into origins, or personal writing on blogs and social media. At the same time, life writing remains a contested arena, whether it is accused of individualist navel-gazing or complicity with the neoliberal commodification of the self. Self-narration occurs today on an industrial scale, producing masses of data that artificial intelligence feeds on to understand and regulate human life.
Mapping this set of practices is essential, given their formal and generic diversity. The memoirs of an amateur writer have nothing in common with experimental postmodern biofiction, the investigation of a “non-witness” into his or her past, or an intimate meditation on the experience of bereavement. Similarly, the variety of uses and meanings of life writing merits investigation. Life stories can be seen as a form of redescription and a mode of knowledge, enabling individuals to make sense of the world and their place within it, but also as tools of self-transformation, where authors perform and renew their identities and destinies. Political questioning is increasingly mingled with aesthetic debate, while biographical and autobiographical storytelling raises new ethical and legal concerns. In the question of life writing, the anthropology of modern subjectivity is at stake, as is the complex construction of collective memory.
This online French-US seminar organized by Alison James and Alexandre Gefen will focus on recent publications and approaches in the field, and promote dialogue between literary and critical traditions.
10:00 am – 12:00pm Central Time (US) / 17:00-19:00 Paris
Axes thématiques : Politiques des littératures et des arts : enjeux et situations, Politiques des arts et des littératures, Transculturalités littéraires et artistiques, Intermédialités, interartialités
Mots-clés : Littératures et terrains