Deadline: June 23, 2023
Call for Papers
Princeton University Graduate Student Conference, October 6-7, 2023
*To Be Held In-Person*
The Art of Self-Obsession? Interrogating Slavic Ego-Documents and Auto-Fiction
Interrogating his own diaristic output, the young Leo Tolstoy wrote that the “motto” of his diary “should be ‘not for proof, but for a narrative.’” As this suggests, autobiographical texts – letters, diaries,memoirs, etc. – can possess a poetics all of their own. Now, in the Internet age, such forms proliferate more than ever, radically expanding the remit of what can constitute an ego-document. Spanning
numerous figures and media, from Avvakum, to TikTok, Slavic cultures are saturated with content about the self. Moreover, ego-documents and their poetics form the foundation of seminal scholarly works from the likes of Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov. The “ego-text” in the broadest sense is – perhaps most importantly – a vehicle for self-articulation for those at both the center and margins of culture and society.
We invite submissions that interrogate the boundaries of what constitutes the autobiographical mode, and its poetics, in the Slavic context. How have specific political conditions across Eastern Europe shaped the production of ego-documents, and are there distinctive national and historical forms that emerge from these contexts? What can frameworks that have long been associated with autobiographical writings, such as trauma studies and ideas of postcoloniality, do for readings of Eastern European texts? To what extent can we speak of an ego-document’s formal devices or structure? When, how, and why do autobiographical readings fail? What critical possibilities do such approaches foreclose? We hope to develop and discuss these questions at our conference.
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