Source:
http://www.livjm.ac.uk/inside/schools/mcca/research/lch/5280.asp
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CALL FOR PAPERS
Liverpool John Moores University
Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History
"Texts of Testimony: Autobiography, Life-Story Narratives and the
Public Sphere"
23-25 August 2001
Speakers will include:
Nancy K. Miller (City University New York), Alessandro Portelli
(University of Rome), Carolyn Steedman (University of Warwick),
Paul Thompson (University of Essex), Ken Wiwa (University of
Toronto)
Life-story narratives, "texts of testimony", have long played a
prominent role in public discourse. Personal testimony, whether in
the form of self-writing or of life-narrative elicited and published by
interlocutors, has offered a means by which the experience of
individuals can be articulated in the public sphere to support or
challenge current regimes of political power and cultural authority,
to call attention to the needs of marginalised social groups, and to
focus the definition of emergent social identities. Such narratives
have seemed to offer a particularly powerful potential for public
action by virtue of their appeal to authenticity, their claim to a direct
rendering of immediate experience. More recently, life stories have
gained a wider cultural presence as a dominant mode of
understanding the self in society.
The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from
different fields to explore ways in which life-story narratives have
been and are being deployed in the public sphere, and interrogate
the modes of analysis which have been developed to understand
them. We invite proposals for papers from contributors working in
literary studies, history, sociology, social psychology,
psychoanalytic studies, in the cultural history of medicine, in
museum curatorship and public education, and in other relevant
areas. Among the themes which the conference will address are:
- the history of autobiography and of other genres of life-narrative;
- the relationships between class, gender, race and sexualities and
traditions of life-narrative;
- the deployment of life-narratives to maintain or challenge political
and cultural regimes;
- the existence of distinct lineages of oppositional/marginal
testimonial texts;
- the relation between public and private in the creation and
meaning of life-narratives;
- the relation of religious traditions of self-questioning to secular
modes of autobiography;
- life-narratives, life-review and the life-course in situations of crisis
and conflict;
- the role of interlocutors in the eliciting, publishing and analysing of
life-histories;
- the impact of markets, audiences and means of publication on
whose stories are told;
- personal testimony and curatorship;
- life-story and visual representation
Proposals (300 words) for papers addressing these themes are
invited by 20 April 2001
To submit papers, or for further information, please email Timothy
Ashplant or Elspeth Graham ([log in to unmask]) or write to
Helen Briscoe: School of MCCA, Liverpool John Moores University,
Dean Walters Building, St James Road, Liverpool L1 7BR, UK.
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