Event overview
Anna Borgarello (Columbia) discusses bifocal life narratives and Riccardo Castellana (Siena) traces the evolution of biofiction in Italy
Anna Borgarello, “Of Adventurers and Storytellers: Narrations of the Self and the Other in Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone and Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère”
The traditional division between autobiography (or, more recently, autofiction) and biography (or biofiction) has long obscured the existence of texts that combine writing of the self and writing of the other(s). Particularly, in the past few decades, an increasing number of works show what I call a “bifocal structure,” i.e., a structure which, as in an ellipsis, hinges upon two foci: an autobiographical/ autofictional narrator and a biographical/ biofictional other. As such, these texts stage a confrontation in which the authorial narrator develops a sense of the self through the mirror and against the backdrop of a historical other, in a complex movement of identification and differentiation. In my talk, I will approach this double portrait by focusing on the narrative structures through which personal identities are largely constructed.
Riccardo Castellana, “Biofiction in Italy: typologies, traditions and reception”
My paper will trace the history of biofiction in Italy, starting from the first, and isolated, experiments of the forties up to the works published in the first twenty years of the 21st century by authors like Michele Mari, Walter Siti and others. Some of the problems on which I will focus my attention are: 1) the way in which biographical fiction has gradually emancipated itself from the nineteenth-century historical novel; 2) its differences with the fictionalized biography; 3) the reference to important late nineteenth-century models such as Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires (1896), together with the works of Jorge Luis Borges; 4) different types of fictionality from a narratological point of view; 5) recurrence of structural patterns like that of “parallel lives” and the persistence of the Plutarchic model in modern biofiction.
More information on the speakers and the event
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Jan 2023 | 5:30pm - 7:15pm |
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