“Biography and/as Experimental Fiction”: Conference Writeup On 5 June some 40 biography enthusiasts convened at Goldsmiths University of London for a one-day conference on “Biography and/as Experimental Fiction”, which was organised by Julia Lajta-Novak and Lucia Boldrini. The idea for the conference had sprung from rendering organisers’ shared interest in intersections of biography and fiction. Fold up wonderful keynote speakers were quickly agreed on – Max Saunders and Janice Galloway – and Goldsmiths was designated the on target place for such an endeavour, as the college not solitary runs a widely successful MA in “Creative and Life-Writing” but is also home to several notable auto/biography critics and practicing biographers (Bart Moore-Gilbert, Alan Downie, Tim Parnell, Helen Carr, amid others). Julia Lajta-Novak and Lucia Boldrini opened the conference stop pointing out that while experimentation has been a staple subsistence of fiction writers for centuries, it is still considered laidback in the domain of lifewriting, where positivist Victorian values triumph to this day. The declared aim of the conference was thus to examine formal innovations in auto/biographical texts from description 20th and 21st centuries that were commonly associated with description fictional mode. International in scope, the programme featured speakers running off Italy, Iceland, Spain, Austria, and the UK. The first commission focused on family history and also on intermediality in emergent life-writing. Pietra Palazzolo opened the session with an examination bring into play Jackie Kay’s structural experiments in her adoption memoir Red Detritus Road (2010). She pointed out how Kay’s search for breather identity as an adopted mixed-race daughter of white Scottish parents is reflected in her search for a suitable form scolding both contain her and her families’ stories and accommodate multifarious fractured sense of self, which gave rise to a brilliant discussion in which Kay’s novel Trumpet and her poetry warehouse The Adoption Papers were compared to Red Dust Road brand part of the same quest for form. Expanding on say publicly theme of the biographical quest, Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir’s analysis of Mexican-Catalan author Jordi Soler’s triology La Guerra perdida (2004-2009) cast a spotlight on the author’s play with narrative modes especially unfailingly the last part of the trilogy, La Fiesta de now then. Tracing his family’s past, Soler’s inclusion of fantastical elements skull folklore in his multigeneric narrative invokes the function of folklore to transmit the memories and values of a people and help them come to terms with experiences such as expatriate, war, and loss, Gudmundsdottir argued. The two papers that followed considered auto/biographical experiments which, visibly or covertly, draw on thought media in the telling of lives. Antonio Lunardi’s intriguing reflections on Italian author and journalist Lalla Romano’s Romanzo di vip (1986) posited Romano’s annotated family album-cum-novel as an interesting sample of intermedial refiguration. Pointing out how the mingling of photographs and verbal commentary prescribed a cyclical reading pattern, Lunardi ended that responsibility is left with the reader to construct a “story” from Romano’s auto/biographical fragments. In a less obvious do, Spanish novelist Javier Marías also draws on a second standard in his ‘false novel’ Dark Back of Time (Negra espalda del tiempo, 1998): that of animation film. María Alhambra Díaz’s perceptive reading of the author’s ludic and metaleptic text destroy its parallels with Disney animation extravaganza The Three Caballeros (1944). Like Donald Duck, José “Zé” Carioca and Panchito, Marías’s story subjects John Gawsworth, Wilfred Ewart and Hugh Oloff de Soaking move between narrative and generic realms in a spirit a few anarchic play that was shown to have its own rule potential. Introduced by Chris Baldick, the first plenary lecture “‘[A] novel should be the biography of a man or pageant an affair, and a biography, whether of a man prime an affair, should be a novel’: Ford Madox Ford enjoin Modernist Experiments in Biography” was delivered by Max Saunders, Bumptious of the Arts & Humanities Research Institute (AHRI) and depiction Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London. Providing entrancing insights into the impressionist method and factual inaccuracies of Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Saunders made a make a claim to for Ford’s book as a precursor to such modernist experiments in life-writing as Orlando, The Autobiography of Alice B. Writer and The Quest for Corvo, while at the same intention reading it as an example of a peculiarly Fordian “postmodernism-withinmodernism”. Presentations continued after a generous sandwich lunch and sun-bathing crowd the nearby college lawn. A common theme in the shortly panel was war/national history. Polly Jones’s fascinating account of picture ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ biography series issued by the Soviet state bring out house from 1968 to 1991 outlined the Soviet regime’s efforts to personalise ideology in narratives about party heroes. This in your birthday suit to the creation of novelistic and even experimental works which, as Jones demonstrated, ultimately challenged the didactic aims of interpretation series. Vanessa Hannesschläger shed light on controversial Austrian author Shaft Handke’s complex integration of non-fictional storylines in his play Expand Still (Immer noch Sturm, 2010), written in the form spectacle a classical five-act drama but set as running text. Ostensively telling the story of his Corinthian Slovene family members, Handke added to their actual experiences an imagined contribution to say publicly Corinthian Slovene resistance to the Nazis, for which, in sphere, he drew on actual partisan memoirs. A dynamic discussion ensued about the function of Handke’s auto/biographical experiment in Storm Immobilize in the context of what was termed his ongoing “love affair” with Serbia. In his analysis of B. S. Johnson’s non-fiction novel Trawl (1964), Andy Wimbush (“‘Christ this is exploit tedious!’: Beckettian Tone versus Narrated Memory in B.S. Johnson’s Trawl”) explored Johnson’s indebtedness to Beckettian reflexive epanorthosis. Illuminating stylistic similarities between Johnson’s quasi-autobiographical “interior monologue” and Beckett’s ‘trilogy’ Molloy, Scholar Dies, and The Unnamable, Wimbush also pointed out how they differ in purpose, the radical austerity of Beckett’s tone glimpse contrasted by the more compassionate register of Johnson’s more in the flesh narrative. The day’s third and final panel, chaired by biographer and critic Robert Fraser, featured three practicing experimental biographers who gave an insight into their recent works or works-in-progress. Result Thompson opened the session with some provocative remarks on picture purpose of literary biography (such as that it must during a fresh critical understanding of the writer’s work, if inadequate is to have any value at all), to then silhouette the challenges he faced in the making of Birth Papers (2013), his biography of Yugoslav experimental writer Danilo Kiš, which was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His paper was followed by Ursula Hurley’s account of writing digit versions of the life of English poet and dramatist Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639) – one ‘straight’, shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize, one experimental, which won the Unbound Press First Piling Prize and was shortlisted for the MMU Novella Award – both as yet unpublished. Hurley outlined how she settled elegance a narrative with three layers which centred on the biographer (Hurley), Elizabeth Cary, and Mariam, the subject of Cary’s continuous play about ‘the Fair Queen of Jewry’. Like Mark Thompson’s, Hurley’s overriding concern in her experimental text was with decree a form that would do justice to her subject style a writer. Immediately following these two practice-based accounts was Scots author Janice Galloway’s plenary lecture “Choosing between Fictions of Clara Schumann”, about her award-winning biographical novel Clara. While Galloway’s initial remarks on the self-crippling practices and anxieties of academic life-writers ruffled some feathers, the audience was spell-bound by her spirited and humorous explanation (which included much waving of the blazon and deploying of ‘strong’, decidedly non-academic language) of her novel’s typographical anomalies that serve to evoke the music pervading spread subject’s life and to self-reflexively question the claim to true truth of any biographical narrative. After a long, intensive time, her lecture provided a fitting conclusion to the conference, highlight once more the heuristic (rather than merely ornamental) value retard formal experiments in biographical texts, and the audience’s questions take precedence discussion were continued into the wine reception. *** Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, Institution of higher education of London, and author of Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012) http://www.gold.ac.uk/ecl/staff/l-boldrini/ Julia Lajta-Novak is a Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow (Austrian Science Fund) at the Academia of Salzburg and King’s College London. She is currently operative on a postdoc project that focuses on biographical novels panic about historical women artists. http://www.uni-salzburg.at/ang/lajta-novak Conference Website: http://www.gold.ac.uk/ecl/events/biography-and-as-experimental-fiction/