CfP: Memory, Autobiography, Autofiction: Herta Müller’s Resistance to Totalizing Forms (Panel) (NeMLA 2025)
Philadelphia, PA
Organization: Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA) annual convention
Event: NeMLA 2025
CfP: Memory, Autobiography, Autofiction: Herta Müller’s Resistance to Totalizing Forms (Panel)
Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA) annual convention
Philadelphia, PA
March 6 - 9, 2025
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2024 through NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20970
In “Life and Literature: Autobiography, Referentiality, and Intertextuality in Herta Müller’s Work”, Lyn Marven points out that “[m]inority writing is often viewed as documentary rather than literary, read for what it can tell us about the other lives and communities it depicts” (205), and the experiences of Müller’s fictional characters, especially their encounters with the Securitate, the Romanian Secret Police, have often been read as Müller’s own experiences. Marven argues, “material from Müller’s life and experiences in Romania does form the basis for much of her literary texts, but it is not identical with these” (207). Similarly, the Introduction of Valentina Glajar’s recently published monograph, The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller. A “File Story” of Cold War Surveillance, asks how we might “reconcile Müller’s ever-evolving memories of traumatic encounters with the Securitate under the communist regime with the predictably diverging and rather unexpected version of events collated in her file” (15). While Glajar herself does not answer this question, she presents an opportunity for scholars to reexamine the fluid frontier between the autobiographic and creative fantasy in Herta Müller’s oeuvre as “they intersect and transform into an artistic text” (15).
In light of this new scholarship on Herta Müller’s Securitate files, this panel seeks to revisit the relationship between the factual and fictional in Müller’s work. Rather than argue that “subjective memory hinders accurate reconstruction of the past or simply point to the differences between the literary and biographic accounts of events” (Glajar 15), we aim to build upon previous scholarship on the complex relationship between life and writing (Marven 206), and to further expand upon the poetics and politics of Herta Müller’s concept and praxis of “Autofiktion”. Topics might include but are not limited to:
--New approaches in scholarship since Müller’s Securitate file became available to researchers
--Collaboration and Resistance: Müller’s reactions to her Securitate file and former Securitate sources, and Müller’s first post-Nobel publication, Cristina und ihre Attrappe, oder Was (nicht) in den Akten der Securitate steht (2009)
--Experimentation with style, political subversion, and resistance in Müller’s early fiction, novels, collages, poetological essays, articles, and interviews
--Edits, cuts, additions, accusations of censorship, and “authenticity” in the various editions of Müller’s early short fiction in Neue Literatur (1979 - 1981), Kriterion (1982), Rotbuch (1984), and Hanser (2010)
--Discussions and controversies surrounding Müller as a public intellectual and a voice of resistance
--Utopia(s): “Utopiekritik”, “Gegenbilder”, “Verengung des Utopischen”, "geschlossene Systemutopien" (Herta Müller-Handbuch, Norbert Otto Eke)
--Life-writing, memory, and trauma
--Niederungen at 40 (Conference: “Niederungen at 40. Herta Müller’s Aesthetics of Resistance and the Legacy of her Literary Work” School of Advanced Study, University of London, April 2024)
--Fiction and testimony: Müller's engagement with Oskar Pastior's life and work in Atemschaukel (2009)
--Transformations of experience and perception into writing: Realism, surrealism, and surfiction in Müller’s work
--Comparison to authors such as Christa Wolf, Sarah Kirsch, Elfriede Jelinek, Arundhati Roy, and William Totok
Works Cited
Eke, Norbert Otto. "Utopie." In Herta Müller-Handbuch, edited by Norbert Otto Eke, 241-245. Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung & Carl Ernst Poeschel GmbH, 2017.
Glajar, Valentina. The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A "File Story" of Cold War Surveillance. Camden House, 2023.
Marven, Lyn. "Life and Literature: Autobiography, Referentiality, and Intertextuality in Herta Müller’s Work." Herta Müller, edited by Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 204-223.
Please submit abstracts by September 30, 2024 through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20970 . For questions, please contact the panel organizers Syed Habeeb Tehseen (habeeb.tehseen@duke.edu) and Maria S. Grewe (mgrewe@jjay.cuny.edu).
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20970
Syed Habeeb Tehseen