Newsletter The Work of Life-Writing
King’s College London
May 26-28, 2009
This major conference is being hosted by the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, in collaboration with the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina. Plenary speakers will include:
Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Paul John Eakin, Ira. B. Nadel, Hermione Lee, Philippe Lejeune, Trudier Harris, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Kathryn Hughes.
The conference will aim to assess the current state of the field of Life-Writing, from an inter-disciplinary and international perspective, identifying its major recent developments in theory as well as practice, and including some of the more creative experiments (in fields such as poetry, as well as visual and electronic media).
The idea of ‘The Work of Life-Writing’ is that it could be taken to cover the following (often interrelated) areas:
1. The pragmatics of life-writing: what political, social, intellectual, or emotional benefits ensuing from writing lives.
2. The work contributed by life-writing to other disciplines, such as history (cultural memory, feminism, social history, etc); medicine (case histories); law (testimony, character references etc); philosophy (examples and hypotheticals) etc.
3. The psycho-analytic effects of writing auto/biography etc. What life writing does for its authors; its readers; its societies (which shades off into more sociological/anthropological/historical approaches).
4. The therapeutic work effected by life-writing. This would encompass illness narratives, abuse narratives, but also reflective narratives of all kinds. (This may be hard to distinguish from the previous category, but perhaps deals with effects that are more conscious.)
5. The cultural function of life-writing – whether considered in sociological, anthropological, or cultural-critical terms.
6. Reflective work on the practice of writing, or writing about, auto/biography and other life-writing forms.
7. Life-writing, performance, and performativity, including visual media.
8. Auto/biography as a literary work, and the contribution it makes to a writer’s ‘work’ or ‘works’.
9. The work ethic of Life-writing. The idea here would be to consider ways in which conventional emphases on a subject’s public acts or literary works may shape or even falsify the sense of a life, downplaying other, non-work, experiences. Also to consider the role of ‘play’ in life-writing, understood both in terms of scandalous refusals (such as Lytton Strachey’s) to take biographical subjects seriously; and also in the Derridean sense of play in the system, which problematises the life-writer’s work.
10. The work life-writing does in the literary field. To explore the ways in which biography, autobiography, letters etc are implicated in the definitions of canons, genres, and modes of interpretation.
The conference will be structured with up to 36 parallel paper sessions in addition to the keynote and plenary lectures. Sessions are envisaged to include the following topics:
The State of the Field
Life-Writing and Medical Humanities
Diaries and Journals and Letters
Auto/Biography and Psychoanalysis
Interdisciplinary Life-Writing
The Pragmatics of Life-Writing
Life- and Death-Writing
Life-Writing and the Senses
Class Consciousness and Auto/biography
Portraiture
Memory Maps
Life-Writing and Memory Cultures
Offers of papers, with a 200-500 word abstract, should be sent to Max Saunders by 15 December 2008. max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk Selected papers from the conference will be published, either in a special journal issue or a volume of essays.
Clare Brant, Max Saunders
Co-Directors, Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London; 24. 10. 2008
