Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference 2025

Philadelphia, PA

6-9 March 2025

Significant rises in literacy rates from 1500-1800 in Europe signify the move to private life, as “personal communion with a read of written text liberated the individual from the old mediators, feed him or her from the control of the group” (Chartier 119, 121). Rise in active popular readership is closely tied not only to greater independence, mobility, and even civil liberty, but also to the common reader cultivating an inner life, where reading, though now private, was not necessarily solitary. Memoir invites the private reader into a space of shared humanity, encouraging others to continue to share their stories with others, and providing a basis for making meaningful connections, particularly when dealing with experiences that alienate, isolate, disrupt, and re-form the writer’s (and reader’s) self-concept.

Just as active readership contributed to the development and popularity of the realistic novel in the 18th century, contemporary readership interested in lived experience pushes the genre forward and indicates a shift in the understanding of selfhood and subjectivity in an increasingly technological and postmodern world where everyday life is rife with exposure to traumatic experience, media inundates consumers with graphic depictions of human suffering, and even young children actively engage in curating a portrait of the self online. Amid corporate and influencer-level pandering to their audiences’ perceived values, snippets of very real on-going humanitarian crises and war crimes interrupt scrolling daily, yet Americans still search for something authentic (but not too real) in this cultural post-pandemic burnout.

With this rise in popular nonfiction readership and technological accessibility of both memoir and memoirists in increasingly democratizing forms, the reader/writer dynamic is changing both for memoir authoring and readership, and the connection between reader and writer is changing, as readers can communicate with the author directly through social media, which offers possibilities for positive and meaningful impact for both reader and writer. Inevitably generic change evolves as new forms of memoir continue to emerge, as do the global shifts and crises.

This accepted panel invites discussions of memoir in prose, graphic, visual, and video forms, particularly those that center on evolving forms of the genre, readership studies, or surviving both natural and man-made disasters.  For general inquiries, please contact dfrenc12@kent.edu.  Finally, no remote presentations are permitted per NeMLA guidelines, so please be ready to present in Philadelphia.  For all general guidelines and 2025 NeMLA Conference information see: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html.

Submit your abstract to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21345 by 30 September 2024.