Living Between the Lines: Transgressive (Auto)Biography as Genre and Method

by Tomáš Hanzálek — last modified 2012-02-14 16:59

Living Between the Lines: Transgressive (Auto)Biography as Genre and Method
Brno, Czech Republic, 28-30 October 2010

Living Between the Lines:

Transgressive (Auto)Biography as Genre and Method

A conference to be held on

28-30 October 2010

Organized and hosted by

The Department of English and American Studies,

Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University,

Brno, Czech Republic

This conference, open to scholars, authors, and non-specialists alike, aims to promote the study of transgressive (auto)biography by investigating the transformations and cross-continental influences that have proven central to the development of (auto)biographies that bide between genres. Especially in the last two decades, there has been a global renaissance in the production of texts that purposefully and self-reflexively blur the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in order to examine the multiple ways lives are written and selves are constructed. The principal objective of this conference is to situate the latest postmodern and postcolonial alternatives into what appears to be a well-established tradition of transgressive (auto)biographical writing in English.

On October 28th, the conference will begin with a round-table discussion by a range of practicing (auto)biographers and scholars in this field. A special issue of the bi-annual scholarly journal Brno Studies in English

(a print and open-source, peer-reviewed publication of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University), an issue devoted to papers by the round-table participants, will be published and made available by September 2010. This publication will serve as the object of consideration during the round-table discussion.

The two-day conference that will follow will be comprised of seminars and workshops on Transgressive (Auto)Biography. Some of the areas that will be addressed are biography in fiction, dialogic (auto)biography, fictionalized biography, innovative biography, literary biography, metabiography, pastoral biography, and personal nonfiction.