On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions. Subsequently published as Alphabetical Diaries (2024), Heti’s work evokes Roland Barthes’s conception of autobiography as the generation of “a further text,” one that is ultimately “totally fictive,” as well as his celebration of the “euphoric” nature of the alphabet. Heti, like Barthes, posits autobiography as an aesthetic endeavor to write, rewrite, and disarrange the self against ideological coherence.

This panel invites papers on autofiction, autobiographical writing, and autofictional film/media that resist dominant ideological narratives surrounding identity, memory, race, gender, sexuality, or authorship. Proposals that put these texts or artifacts in conversation with the 2027 NeMLA Convention’s focus on “cultural knowledge,” “empowerment,” and “constructing agency” are particularly encouraged. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):

–Autobiography or memoir as archive of cultural knowledge

–Autofiction as counter-ideological practice

–Autofictional film, hybrid documentary, and the mediation of identity

–Digital selves and alternative modes of self-representation

–Memory, fragmentation, and the recursive self

–Readerly expectations: disclosure, concealment, and authenticity

–Reimagining self, community, and cultural agency

Convention dates: March 6–9, 2027, Newport, RI. Please submit proposals of 200-300 words by September 30, 2026: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22447.