Refashioning the Self: Authorial Construction in Autobiographical Writing

Abstracts are invited for a proposed special session at the annual Modern
Language Association Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27-30
December 2006.

This session, pending approval of the MLA program committee, will examine
how authors write about themselves in various contexts. Papers may explore
authorial self-reflexivity in novels, poetry, diaries, letters, or other
contexts such as e-mail or speeches. The session will address such
questions as the following:

--How do authors construct themselves through their work?
--To what extent does an author's construct of self differ from, say, a
biographer's construct?
--In what ways does the author-created self inform our understanding of his
or her biography?
--What legitimacy do we give to authorial self construction?
--How do autobiographical tendencies in a work change our interpretation of
the piece and other works?
--How might the author's self-construction reshape our understandings of
genre?

Please send an abstract (300-word limit, please), a brief vitae, and
relevant contact information to ben_p_robertson_at_hotmail.com by 15 March
2006. Submissions by e-mail are preferred, but you may post your materials
to:

Ben P. Robertson
English Department
Troy University
Troy, AL 36082

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Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 14:32:39 EST