Welcome to SAAS

Call For Papers for Our Next Conference

"The Image and the Word"

PANEL 16

16) "An Uncomfortable Truth: Women's Autofiction in American Literature and Media"
Panel Chair: Rebeca Gualberto Valverde, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
E-mail: rgualberto@ucm.es  

Author Lily Tuck, following Serge Doubrovsky (1977), explains autofiction as a genre in which "the author … tends to be both the narrator and the central character …, uses his or her real name, describes daily life often inventing or modifying certain facts, and does so in search not only for truth and justice but for the self." Autofiction is then a combination of fact and deliberate fiction. Well-established in countries like France and Spain, it has recently gained critical attention in the United States, where feminist criticism has turned its gaze to authors like Chris Kraus, Cookie Mueller or Siri Hustvedt, among others. These writers explore the fictional and hence public construction of the private female 'I', which, by moving from the text to the world, transgresses the traditional boundaries of confessional writing.

However, this recent rise in women's autofiction transcends the limits of the traditional narrative. It means a shift in female public authority made possible by Internet culture that allows instant access to publishing and feedback for first-person narratives (vlogs, blogs, social networks, lit-magazines, etc.) that are also invading mass media. Among these, television stands out thanks to the flourishing of highly personal TV shows, starring the same people—mostly women—who write the scripts, direct and produce stories that fictionalize their own lives (Lena Dunham's Girls, Pamela Adlon's Better Things, Issa Rae's Insecure, Frankie Shaw's SMILF, etc).

This panel invites proposals from varied disciplines within the field of American Studies that explore the subject of women's autofiction in different media, particularly on the following topics:

• Private construction and public projections of the female self
• From private to universal female subjectivity
• Private experience and public speech
• Autofiction, autobiography and memoir in female life-writing
• The Internet and the public self
• Autofiction in mass media
• Emotional autobiography and female performance
• The ethics of autofiction: the limits of (mis)representation
• Female showrunners and the rise of personal television
• Contemporary reception of autofictional narratives in America
• Intersectional approaches to women’s autofiction
• Autofiction as a postcolonial strategy.
• The politics of autofiction: transforming the self to change the world
• The multiplication of autofictional genres
• Autofiction as a critical tool in American Studies

GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPANTS

Please submit all paper proposals directly to the Panel Chair using this form no later than October 15, 2018.

Panel Chairs will notify applicants of their acceptance/rejection no later than November 15, 2016.

For information on the Conference Venue see the Organizing Committee's website.

SAAS members, ASA members, and other scholars (not necessarily affiliated with any of these associations), are invited to submit proposals to the panel of their choice. Donwload this form, fill it out, and send it via email to the chair of your selected panel.

In order to present a paper, participants who are not SAAS, ASA, APEAA or HELAAS members will be required to pay a one year's membership fee (and enjoy the benefits for the following year) plus the conference fee.

Students have to become SAAS members (if they are not SAAS/ASA/APEEA/HELAAS members already) and pay 50 percent of the registration fee (60€ early bird/75€ late registration) if they wish to present a paper and/or attend the "Félix Martín" Doctoral Seminar.

Deadline: October 15, 2018

Further guideliness for participants can be found here.