Event overview
This online Symposium concludes the 2025 Auto / Bio / Fiction series of the Centre for Comparative Literature. Keynote session with Barbara Carnevali, Rachel Cusk and Josh Cohen
"He was describing […] what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was." (Cusk, Outline)
"The desire to express your pure, naked self, to bring it into the light of day, can only end in frustration, in the feeling that what you most wanted to show remains in the dark."(Cohen, The Private Life)
Cusk’s words, frequently quoted as an encapsulation of the “Outline” trilogy project, suggest the quest for a structure that can accommodate the self and all its fragments; Cohen’s highlight the “irresolvable paradox” of wanting to expose and share our most private selves but being unable to do so.
That narrative gives shape to the fragments of memory, of documents and of archives has become a given of historiography as much as of life-writing – whether biography, autobiography, autofiction, biofiction, or any form around and in-between those; but Cusk’s and Cohen’s words suggest something more, the search for some external, formal and intertextual structures to give a shape, an outline, to the murky darkness that resides in us and in other selves.
Surely, trying to express a self – one’s own or someone else’s – does seem like an epic project to take on, perhaps even a foolish one, as Don Quijote’s taking on of the epic was. Or does the epic cloak provide a legitimacy to the otherwise singularly inward-looking project of autofiction, or the somewhat dubious morality of appropriating another’s story in the project of biofiction? Or is the recent boom of autofiction and biofiction simply the latest stage in the long history of the evolution of literary form, both a culmination of and an overcoming of the hegemony of the novel, both an intensification of and a challenge to the individualism of modernity?
We are delighted that our Symposium’s keynote lecture will be given by Professor Barbara Carnevali on Rachel Cusk’s work; and that Rachel Cusk and Josh Cohen will respond to the lecture and will be in conversation with Carnevali on the forms and challenges of auto/bio/fiction.
More information on the event, the programme and the speakers
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Jun 2025 | 9:00am - 6:45pm |
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