While waiting to find the answers to my questions and redo the way up my characters, I run this conference:
REPORT TO THE REAL IN CREATING CONTEMPORARY
Opponent Emmanuel Carrère explored in 2002 the figure of the murderer usually by the character of Jean-Claude Roman. Amelie Nothomb takes the stage for several years in his various novels (think Fear and Trembling , for example) and accentuates this staging by placing systematically a photograph of herself on the cover. Sophie Calle's work is, in turn, traversed by a constant blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction, the personal and the public. Nelly Arcand, Marie-Sissi Labreche and Melanie Gelinas each, through the characters deliberately inspired by their own experiences, played on the borders of the self-fiction. If this phenomenon is not new, what is intriguing, however, is the vehemence with which the relationship to reality in the various works is questioned. In recent years, the distinction between fiction and works non-fiction (to use the English term) appears fragile. A series of scandals involving alleged autobiography has rocked the literary world (and media) America. A Million Little Pieces (James Frey, 2003), Love and Consequences (Margaret Seltzer, 2008), The Angel at the Fence (never published): each these autobiographies was disproved when it was discovered that the facts there had either been "embellished "Or outright invented, and their authors have been disowned, if not in the public arena booed by speakers (think Oprah Winfrey) insulted for believing in them. But the question arises: why, initially, to claim a work of fiction authentication of reality that accompanies the term "autobiography"? And why in a second time, the confession of a fictionalization of events shocked as he?
From unveiling the term, operating in the reconstruction, contemporary writing seems to be playing boundaries between fiction and reality, as if it was inhabited by a need to redefine its relationship with reality and, thereby, to fiction. Is it because of the media invasion that makes more and more difficult (if not impossible) to ignore the spectacle of reality as presented by the news bulletins on both the web and on television in the world ? The report creation is found there parasitized by events when the real, as in the September 11 attacks, appears to surpass the fiction, and fiction that seeks, in turn, to support the real? Or we just feel the need, after the formal explorations of the twentieth century, reviving the creative work in our world?
This conference, wishing to collect as many writers as literary scholars, will aim to question the inclusion of the real in contemporary fiction. Why real exercise he so great attracted to the current authors? What space is there for fiction when the writer uses a life event, whether personal or historical, as a base or frame of his work? How notions of fiction, narrative, characters and writers found it changed? By comparing the work of practitioners and theorists, this conference will try not to reach a definitive answer on how the inclusion of reality but rather to achieve a state of fiction as it is practiced now with all that this state ad'éphémère.
Proposals for papers (250-300 words) should be submitted at dulong.annie @ uqam.ca before 23 October 2009 . Please enter your contact information (name, email, home university, status) on your proposal. The symposium will be subsequently proposed to the organizers of the annual ACFAS conference to be held from 10 to 14 May 2010 at the University of Montreal.
Organizing Committee:
Denise Brassard
Annie Dulong
