Event overview
The first seminar of 2025 in the Auto / Bio / Fiction series will focus on autofiction with writer Kim Adrian and critic Karen Ferreira-Meyers.
Kim Adrian, “On Script-Flipping Genres”
The impulse to flip the script on traditional ideas of authority and relevance by focusing on the ordinary, the individual, and the everyday is a well-known earmark of autofiction. In this talk, I’ll examine how this same impulse shows up in four other relatively new genres: the microhistory, the hermit crab essay, the contemporary memoir, and what’s sometimes called “autobiographical criticism” or “critical memoir.”
Using examples from my own work, I’ll provide brief overviews and examples of each genre, look at how each one performs this script-flipping activity in its own unique way, and, most importantly, examine the question of Why? Why, now, do we see this dogged insistence—in genre after genre—on the primacy of the small-scale and the intimate?
Karen Ferreira-Meyers, “Unveiling Truths: The Bold Art of Women’s Autofiction”
“Unveiling Truths: The Bold Art of Women’s Autofiction” explores how contemporary women writers use autofiction as a powerful tool to navigate, reveal, and challenge personal and societal boundaries. Autofiction allows authors to blur the lines between reality and imagination, creating spaces where women’s lived experiences and inner worlds can be authentically and creatively expressed. This talk examines the unique strengths of women’s autofiction in dismantling traditional narratives around gender, identity, trauma, and agency. By intertwining real events with fictional elements, female writers construct narratives that defy the limitations of strict autobiography, allowing them to present complex, multi-layered selves that resist categorisation or simplification.
In analysing works from key authors such as Annie Ernaux, Sheila Heti, and Virginie Despentes, the talk will delve into how these writers challenge norms around femininity, relationships, and the societal expectations imposed on women’s bodies and choices, and will explore how autofiction serves as a form of self-reclamation and resistance, giving women the freedom to present their vulnerabilities, desires, and contradictions without conforming to prescriptive roles.
Ultimately, Unveiling Truths advocates for the recognition of women’s autofiction as a bold artistic approach that not only redefines narrative boundaries but also contributes significantly to feminist literature and the broader cultural discourse on identity and selfhood.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Jan 2025 | 5:30pm - 7:15pm |
Accessibility
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