CFP: Seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2014 Annual Conference, Mar. 20-23, New York University.
This seminar invites papers on visual and written accounts produced within autobiographical space, with an emphasis on, but not limited to, Iberian and Latin-American cultural productions. Special interest will be paid to the autobiographical dimension of the essay and its present manifestations across different cultural fields and geographical territories. We welcome contributions from various disciplines, including history, literature and film studies.
The autobiographical tends to be described on a temporal axis but is also inseparable from space. Expanding upon multiple approaches to autobiography, the Latin-American critic Leonor Arfuch has evoked what she calls “the biographical space of the present”: a broad network of hybrid, heterogeneous textualities where new and old forms of biography and autobiography converge. Within such a vast territory, we are especially interested in the autobiographical essay –from the French term “essai,” meaning “attempt”– as an ubiquitous form of thinking.
What are the changing forms of the essay within today’s auto/biographical space? How should we read the reemergence of essay-films, and the relatively recent proliferation of ego-histories? How does the autobiographical essay manifest itself within older and newer forms of literature? What is its relation to fiction? More generally, what is the place of the essay within biographical space? How is it to be conceptualized from and across different disciplines and media? What methods of inquiry are available to us?
We welcome papers in Portuguese, Spanish, English and French.
Autobiographical essay, literature, cultural theory, essay-film, ego-history, digital humanities, Spain, Portugal, Latin-America.
We welcome papers in Portuguese, Spanish and English.
Organized by Patricia López-Gay (Bard College, NY), y Felipe Brandi (Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris).
Submit abstracts directly at
or contact Patricia López-Gay, plopezga@bard.edu, with questions.
The deadline for submissions is Nov. 15.