The Writer Writing the Writer: The Struggle to Represent, Recreate and
Realize the Self (grad) (02/01/2003; 03/22/2003-03/23/2003)
9th Annual McGill University Graduate Student Symposium on Language and
Literature: “Blood Lust, Blood Loss: Representations of Struggle and
Desire”
March 22 & 23, 2003
Montreal, Quebec
Conference website: www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/english/symposium9.html
Narrative, as Paul John Eakin writes, “plays a central, structuring role
in the formation and maintenance of our sense of identity. Most of us,
however, never give much thought to the place of self-narration in our
lives; we run, as it were, on automatic narrative pilot.” Yet writers are
consistently writing the text of their lives. Portraits of the coming of
age of the artist function both as artistic works that establish the
writers’ place as writers, and as introductions to careers that launch the
images of the artists. Novels and short stories of a wide array of writers
often contain autonarrations that shape the public-personas of themselves
as authors. Poetry is full of metaphors of the self that point toward the
poet in order to fashion his or her figure. Autobiographies, memoirs,
diaries, and confessions consciously take up the struggle to represent the
lives, times and identities of their authors. Interviews, articles and
escapades can be seen as attempts to create, control and continue the
writer’s construction of him or herself as a celebrity. To what extent
does the self-written author-text influence our readings of literary,
cultural and historical texts? If, as is often claimed, autobiography is a
fictive-construct based upon teleological patterning, then what conventions
of reading and writing differentiate autobiography from poetry and fiction?
To what extent is it possible for writers to control the construction of
their public persona, and to work to imprint their legends on the cultural
memory to ensure their immortality?
Topics may include but are in no way limited to the following examples:
-autonarration in fiction: Henry Miller, E.E. Cummings and Jack Kerouac
-self-creation through autobiography: Gertrude Stein, Anthony Burgess and
Anais Nin
-the Bildungsroman as artistic introduction: James Joyce, H.G. Wells,
Herman Hesse, J.W. Goethe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Leonard Cohen
-author as celebrity: F. Scott, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Leonard
Cohen
-poetry of the self: William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and Leonard Cohen.
Email 250 word abstracts with a preliminary works consulted page to
brett.parker@mail.mcgill.ca by February 1st, 2003 (no attachments).
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