Biofiction (literature that takes a real biography as its point of departure) is powered by what Colm Tóibín has recently called “the anchored imagination”, which grants the fictional narrative a certain ambiguous (almost duplicitous) credibility. But what do biographical novels mean as world-making vehicles? Is the recent boom in stories that rely on the real past, yet project contemporary visions upon it, only a sign that we are trying to build a coherent world-image of centuries past, or is it also an attempt to bring into being a new way of seeing and/or being in the present? Furthermore, does it foster new visions and teach new lessons for the future? In the light of theories of World Literature proposed by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and others, and using T. O. Beebee’s method of starting from particular areas (in this case, a genre) in our exploration of transnational dynamics, we propose several complementary angles for conceptualizing Biofiction as World Literature: biofiction’s capacity of cross-cultural representation (manifested in novels like Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude, where a writer portrays a famous figure from another cultural area), its world-shaping imagery (detectable in biofictions of explorers, translators, and other cosmopolitan figures), its strong link with cultural memory (which can be traced back to the interwar versions of the roman à clef, to Woolf’s and Schwob’s experiments, and even further back into the mid-nineteenth century), its protean adaptability (seen in its mixture of modernist and postmodernist elements), its appeal to large audiences (sometimes in the form of biopics), its power to address social and political issues (in the works of Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many others) or shifting gender norms (in fictions by Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), its parallel developments across wide spaces and far beyond the West (with the work of Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), and its ability to fuel international theoretical debates. These are just some of the aspects that recommend this genre as a lens for analyzing world-spanning literary developments. If you are interested in more details about our approach and/or you would like to contribute to the dialogue, please consult our website: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers You can send 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers or proposals for panels (including a 300-word cover statement and three 300-word abstracts) to the following email address: biofiction@kuleuven.be. Please include a brief bio note for each speaker (around 150 words). Deadline for submissions: 15th of April 2020

How can we explain the origins of biofiction? Scholars suggest that the history-of-science contributed significantly to the rise of the historical novel, which exposes the way historical forces shape and determine the human. Many scholars treat the biographical novel as a form of the historical novel. But by looking at some authors of biofiction who opposed the determinism and even fatalism implicit in the history-as-science approach and its concomitant aesthetic form, the historical novel, I show how biofiction came into being as an aesthetic reaction against the historical novel. Instead of picturing the historical forces that shape and determine the human, the biographical novel gives readers a model of a figure that defies or evades environmental conditioning or cultural determinism by shaping and determining the world around him or her. In this essay, I focus on Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, and Colm Toibin.

Il saggio di Valentina Vannucci esamina la consapevolezza storica che emerge dalle biofiction postmoderne, cercando di definire la posizione di questi testi nel panorama critico contemporaneo. This essay analyses the type of historical consciousness that emerges from the postmodern genre of biofiction and the position of its texts within the contemporary critical debate. Valentina Vannucci è Dottore di ricerca in Anglistica e Americanistica. Si occupa di letteratura postcoloniale e neostoricismo, della controversia contemporanea sulla revisione del canone letterario e del metaromanzo biografico in lingua inglese. Ha scritto su J.M. Coetzee e Judith Chernaik. Valentina Vannucci holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of Florence. Her fields of interest and research include postcolonial literature, neo-historicism, the contemporary critical debate around the revision of the literary canon and the biographic metafiction. She wrote essays on J.M Coetzee and Judith Chernaik

The essays collected in this volume take up the question of biopoetics in a number of different contexts in order to invest the category with a new set of possible meanings. What appears to be of special importance to us is that the term “biopoetics” immediately raises the question of the complicated relationship between scientific discourses on life and literary representations of life in terms of a relation of mutual determination. Is there such a thing as a poetics of life? What would such a poetics consist of? Shouldwe apply scientific categories of life to the interpretation of literature? Or should we understand literature itself as an important culturalmeans of constructing our “concepts” of life that are then captured, elaborated, and transformed in scientific discourses?

Ed. Anker, Suzanne and Talasek JD.

This is the introduction to my book of interviews with biographical novelists from across the globe. Unlike Truthful Fictions, which contained only my interviews, many other scholars interviewed prominent biographical novelists for this book. My plan is to submit the book to my editor by early February. If you spot any errors or have any suggestions for improvement, please let me know. I still need to write a conclusion. For your benefit, here is the table of contents: Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe Edited by Michael Lackey Table of Contents Kevin Barry, interviewed by Stuart Kane: Positive Contamination in the Biographical Novel Laurent Binet, interviewed by Monica Latham: Reflections on Truth, Veracity, Fictionalization, and Falsification Javier Cercas, interviewed by Virginia Rademacher: Resisting the “dictatorship of the present” in the Biographical Novel Barbara Chase-Riboud, interviewed by Melanie Masterton Sherazi: Sally Hemings’ Staircase: On Biofiction’s Afterlives Emma Donoghue, interviewed by Michael Lackey: Voicing the Nobodies in the Biographical Novel David Ebershoff, interviewed by Michael Lackey: The Biographical Novel as Life Art Hannah Kent, interviewed by Kelly Gardiner: Fictions of Women David Lodge, interviewed by Bethany Layne: The Bionovel as a Hybrid Genre Colum McCann, interviewed by Michael Lackey: Contested Realities in the Biographical Novel Anchee Min, interviewed by Michael Lackey: The Biographical Novelist as Cultural Diagnostician Rosa Montero, interviewed by Virginia Rademacher: Speculative Subjectivities and the Biofictional Surge Stephanus Muller, interviewed by Willemien Froneman: Stitching up the Auto/Biographical Seam Sabina Murray, interviewed by Michael Lackey: Complex Psychologies in the Biographical Novel Nuala O’Connor, interviewed by Julie A. Eckerle: The Slant Truth of the Biographical Novel Susan Sellers, interviewed by Bethany Layne: Postmodernism and the Biographical Novel Colm Tóibín, interviewed by Bethany Layne: The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel Olga Tokarczuk, interviewed by Robert Kusek and Wojciech Szymański: I Believe in the Novel Chika Unigwe, interviewed by Michael Lackey: Biographical Fiction and the Creation of Possible Lives

With the emergence of Bio Art, biotechnology became part of the art world. By bringing cutting edge technologies closer to the public, Bio Art has provoked wider reflection about the ethics of turning biology into technology and in particular has raised questions about the aesthetic and ethical status of manipulating living organisms. By showing transgenic organisms in galleries and museum contexts, Bio Art drew attention to the fact that biotechnology had already crossed the divide between the artificial and the natural back in the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the selective manipulation of living organisms for artistic purposes provoked passionate debates about the shifting concept of life, a concept that has changed dramatically since the arrival of biotechnology within the frame of technoscience. Art emerging from the laboratory opened up non-normative debates about life and its limits in the crossover between Bio Art, ethics, sciences, and the humanities, and also framed controversies about the growing influence of science and technology and a bioscience-based economy on our societies as well as on the fine arts. Whereas in the early days Bio Art primarily sought to reveal the state of the art of biotechnology or tissue engineering, current Bio Art practices interrogate the limits, boundaries, frontiers, and frameworks within which life can exist and how fragile these limits are in an age that some have termed the Anthropocene. Altering nature deliberately using biotechnology – in a scientific laboratory or in the kitchen at home – is still a vital topic in Bio Art. However, because we have transformed our entire planet in recent centuries into a kind of laboratory where traditional distinctions between natural and artificial, subject and object, human and non-human agents no longer hold when confronted by the enormous ecological problems and challenges that exist today, speculative biology is now becoming a major issue in Bio Art. One of the most promising approaches of bringing Bio Art and speculative biology into a fruitful liaison is demonstrated in the work of the Turkish artist and researcher Pinar Yoldas, who has lived in the USA for more than a decade.