Ralph Clare, an associate professor in the Department of English, presided over the roundtable session “Contemporary Autofiction” at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in “virtual” Toronto.
The roundtable addressed the recent boom in anglophone literature of what is increasingly being called autofiction. Panelists from Harvard, Brown, and the Universities of Maryland, and Michigan State considered autofictions as a potential new genre, its marketing ideology, its ties to nationality, and its links with LGBTQ writing of the 80s and 90s.