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Project

Biofictions of Border-Crossing: A World Literature for Outsiders

Following recent developments in the growing field of biofiction studies, this project analyses biographical novels with a social justice component from the perspective of World Literature. The selected corpus includes recent novels set in all continents and in various historical periods, allowing me to map the world-span of contemporary biofiction and its figuration of the dimension of deep time. While all these texts thematize border-crossing and the condition of exile on some level, for a better understanding of the mechanisms of exclusion and of literature’s power to counter them, I propose approaching the corpus from five distinct angles, corresponding to five social justice issues: religious and cultural diversity and the systems of exclusion resisting it, neurodiversity and the ableist exclusion that curtails it, gender identity and the patriarchal structures of exclusion which keep it from asserting itself, queer, trans and non-binary identities and the heteronormative discrimination that restrains them, and finally racial diversity, which was used for a long time as a pretext for injustice and colonial oppression. In exploring the ways in which the novelists I study deal with these topics, I aim to show that biofiction, as a hybrid genre using real-life figures in literary settings, is uniquely situated to testify to the complexities of the position of social outsiders.

Date:1 Oct 2022 →  Today
Keywords:biofiction, world literature, Intersectionality
Disciplines:Biography, Comparative literature studies, Contemporary literature, Gender studies, Literatures in English