题目：Biographical Fictions and/as World Literature
时间: 2022年5月25日（周三）下午16:00-17:30
Zoom会议：https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/96812034946
主讲人：Lucia Boldrini (Goldsmiths, University of London)

讲座概要：
    “We are from a world that no longer exists. If we do not write that world, write it down, then what will become of it?” The words of the Sicilian poet Lucio Piccolo to his cousin Giuseppe in the recent novel Lampedusa (2019), by the Canadian novelist Steven Price, give literature an archival function, putting it in the service of memory and of history. Price’s moving, evocative novel, however, goes much further than the recording of a vanishing past. Resounding with literary echoes and with connections to many other (auto)biographical fictions, it imaginatively (re)creates the creation of a masterpiece as it narrates the last two years of the life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who was by then dying of lung cancer and writing Il gattopardo (The Leopard, rejected by publishers while Tomasi was still alive, published posthumously in 1958 to become a work of world literature, also made famous by Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation in 1963, starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale).
    Deeply rooted in post-war Sicily, in an exhausted world that was giving way to modern Italy and identifying closely with his beloved but crumbling, bombed-out palazzo in Palermo, Tomasi is an avid polyglot reader of literature, a lover of European cities and northern forests, and a man whose life is tightly entwined, for better or for worse, with that of the nation, of Europe, and of the wider world: “His true home stood behind thick walls [...] in a slump of cracked stone and wind-rotted masonry from a bomb borne across the Atlantic, a bomb whose sole purpose was the obliteration of the world as it had been. That bomb fell in April 1943 and his wife’s estate at Stomersee far to the north in Latvia had been overrun by the Russians in the same month.”
    Price’s novel will be my starting point to reflect, through references to a range of other novels, on the relationship between fictional representations of historical lives and conceptions of world literature. In what ways does writing about an individual life concern the world? Beyond the figures of migrants, exiles, explorers, travellers that populate many biofictional novels, how do the modes of biographical, autobiographical, or heterobiogaphical fiction explore or challenge the grounds and boundaries of nation, location, culture, language, tradition, lineage that hem in or sustain identities? How do they negotiate the continuities and fractures – psychological and emotional as much as historical and ideological – between person, home and world? What does the representation of a historical “life” add to our understanding of “world” and of “literature”, how does it inform our thinking about “world literature” as literature aware of its responsibility in the world and to the world that it receives, describes, shapes, creates, passes on as legacy?

主讲人简介：
    Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature. She is a member of the Academia Europaea, and currently serves as Vice-President of the International Comparative Literature Association. Her research interests include fictional biography and autobiography; Joyce, Dante and modernist medievalism; comparative literature; and literature on/of the Mediterranean area. Her major works include Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012), Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (CUP, 2001), and Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (with Julia Novak (Palgrave, 2017).