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Apocryphal Biography and Autobiography

This session seeks papers that examine the use of creative license to
produce an apocryphal biography or autobiography. For the purpose of this
session, apocryphal refers to the adjustment or revision of a personal
history in order to benefit the subject. The process may be conscious or
unconscious: a subject may purposefully mislead a biographer or may 
misremember past events while recounting them. In addition, an
autobiography whose author was not overly honest may become the foundation
for biographies which repeat the same “facts”.  Papers should rely upon
primary and secondary sources, such as letters, diaries, and published
documents, to explore the questionable nature of an accepted biography or
autobiography is.

Previous papers have included: “A Case of Suspicious Genealogy: Abbé
Lambert & the Mansart Family”; “Trauma Victim or Drama Queen?: Art &
Artifice in Sylvia Plath’s Self-Portrayals”; “On Henry Miller’s Spiral Form
in His Autobiographical Novels”; “1850's Letters from Rembrandt: The Place
of Spiritualism in Mount’s (Auto)biography”; “Arthur G. Dove: Reevaluating
the Life & Work of the “Naive” American”; “Eleanor Antin’s Portraiture of
the 1970s: The Fiction of the Self”; “Truth & Fiction: Or, How Buckminster
Fuller Became an Architect”.

The 18th Annual Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association’s 2007
conference is from November  2-4, 2007 at the Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel
in Philadelphia, PA. Registration fees apply. For more information, please
go to < www.mapacagazette.net >.

Deadline for proposals: July 1, 2007

Send 1-page proposal & CV to:

Loretta Lorance
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or:

P.O. Box 461
Inwood Station
New York, NY 10034-0461