Cambridge, England
Joined August 2014
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Cambridge PG Open Day live chat session about funding from Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP (@OOCDTP), today between 1-3 pm (UK time): app.sli.do/event/uaupzywf.
From 14.30 UK time
Panel 22. Classic Rhetoric: between Memorialisation, Damnation and Performance
Panel 23. Life Writing
Panel 24. Practice Led Research: Materiality and Performance
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Panel 23. Life Writing
• Nina Ellis (University of Cambridge). ‘Lucia Berlin’s Short Autofiction: Retelling to Forget'
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In the end, Berlin's stories endure rather than her autobiography...
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And the more one reads Berlin, the harder it is to determine whether the short episodes in the stories really happened: no way of knowing if her husband's dealer was really stabbed...
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Berlin's early work at least precedes Serge Dubrovsky's coinage of the term in 1977.
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Her short form works against the norms of autofiction, which is not meant to be real, but to seem authentic, and typically harnesses significant length as a mark of authenticity.
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She effectively creates new form of short story, persevering experience in her own terms against critiques of peers.
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Berlin accused of amateurism from start, partly due to decision to write stories with great proximity to her own life. Her husband was a heroin addict, for example.
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Feminist criticism’s counsel against over-association of women writers with their lives quite deliberately ignored by Berlin.
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Question is what do her short forms do to the genre of autofiction?
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Officially Berlin's story is fiction (vs De Quincey's 'confession'). But her fiction draws very heavily on her life experience.
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Addiction also a theme in Berlin: stabbing of heroine's husband's heroin dealer in 'Barca de la illusion', in 'Evening in New York' (2018).
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Panel 23. Life Writing
• Alessia Pannese (University of Oxford). ‘Form and (not) forgetting: the case of opium addiction in literature and visual art’
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Similar process at work in addiction, but where adaptation is to the advantage of the organism, addiction is to its disadvantage.
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Gradual transition from deliberate practice to more automatic forms.
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Piranesi's balustrades: opening up new perspectives via staircases, walkways; but also constrictive due to ceilings and blockages.
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