ARN Seminar: "Autofictional Reading and Transformative Thinking" with Dr Alexandra Effe

Welcome to the ARN seminar series! These are free online talks on various topics related to reception studies, open to members of the Australian Reception Network and anyone interested from the general public. We are delighted to welcome Dr Alexandra Effe to deliver our first seminar:

"Autofictional Reading and Transformative Thinking: Possible Selves in Literature and Life"

Abstract: Autofiction is a genre that interweaves the real and the unreal. It is definitionally in some way about the author as real-life person, but also often features elements that are impossible by real-life standards. My talk integrates Text World Theory and Predictive Processing accounts of reading to develop a model of how readers process impossibilities in autofiction. Drawing on psychological insights into the creative qualities of memory and on neuroscientific research on the brain’s default mode network, I put forward the hypothesis that autofictional deviations from real-world possibilities have the potential to lead to transformative thinking by way of changing readers’ conception of what is possible and impossible not only in literature but also in life. I finally draw on reader responses from the platform “Goodreads” as evidence for how autofictional texts affect intuitions about real-life (im)possibilities.

Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow within the interdisciplinary research center “Literature, Cognition and Emotions” (LCE) at the University of Oslo. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017), co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and of Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published articles and book chapters on narrative and cognitive theory, manuscript studies, twenty-first-century literature, postcolonial literature, life writing, and testimonial literature. As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.” At the University of Oslo, she leads an LCE-based project on “Creativity and Crises.”

Register to attend now! Registrations will close 60 minutes before the scheduled starting time.

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