Beyond Authenticity: Affordances of Autofictional Methodology in Contemporary Women's Life-Writing with Smriti Verma (Wolfson College, University of Oxford)
A BSA Auto/Biography Study Group Event
7 January 2026 (1700-1800 GMT)
Online
About the Event
Beyond Authenticity: Affordances of Autofictional Methodology in Contemporary Women's Life-Writing with Smriti Verma (Wolfson College, University of Oxford)
Abstract
The study of women's autobiographies as texts depicting stories of plight, rage and empowerment has been crucial to the development of gender studies in the Western academy (Cooke 2020; Henke 1998; Stewart 2003). However, such scholarship reduces women's lifewriting to source material, obscuring the text from the purview of formal literary criticism in order to privilege a reading of authenticity. There is a need to synthesise scholarship on narrative form with purposeful feminist activism, in order to explore form as strategic necessity. Building on recent scholarship in life-writing (Er 2018; Brueck 2019; Jordan 2013), this seminar analyses autofictional methodology as a radical form for assessing current feminist discourses on violence and care in the works of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk and Xiaolu Guo. What does autofictional methodology make possible in the study and analysis of narrative in contemporary women’s life-writing, and how does it closely interact with the state of contemporary feminism? How does it disrupt the understanding of the memoir as a commodified narrative form? Contemporary autofiction experiments with traditional concepts of character, plot and dialogue, and narrative forms of the novel and the essay. It largely subverts “the referentialist paradigm sustaining the conventional auto/biographical discourse” (Gratton 2001, 86) and employs purposefully constructed formal frameworks to re-frame self-representation. This seminar will include as well a short ‘life-writing’ workshop, where participants partake and dwell on ambiguities and difficulties of assigning a genre to the act of writing nonfiction.
Registration
- Auto/biography Study Group Member/BSA Member: FREE
- Non-Member: £10
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