The aesthetics and politics of contemporary women’s life-writing in Canada and the US: multicultural perspectives

07 March 2015 

Poznań, Poland

The proliferation and popularity of life-writing in the last three decades has resulted in intense critical inquiry focusing on issues ranging from neurobiological sources of narrative identity to writing style and form, from ethical and legal concerns to narrative self-fashioning of the gendered and/or ethnic and racial self in life writing. While throughout the 1970s and 1980s gender provided an important lens through which to view life-writing, the early findings of the essential differences between texts written by women and men were soon invalidated. However, at least for some scholars, gender, especially when complicated by other factors, such as ethnicity, race, class and sexual preference, still provides a valuable lens through which to view life-writing texts.

This conference will focus on life-writing by North American women in the context of the multicultural societies of Canada and the United States. The organizers hope to draw scholars from a variety of disciplines whose research focuses on aesthetic and political issues in memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, letters, testimonies, blogs, personal essays, travel narratives, biographies and other forms of life-writing by Canadian and American women in the past and in the present.

Email queries to the conference secretary at molsza@wa.amu.edu.pl

Conference organisers: Prof. Agnieszka Rzepa, Dr Dagmara Drewniak and Dr Katarzyna Macedulska.

This conference is supported by the National Science Centre Poland under grant PRO-2012/05/B/HS2/04004