*CFP* “AUTO/BIOGRAPHY AND REPUTATION POLITICS”, CARP 2019 CONFERENCE

Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics

6-7 de febrero de 2020

University of Vienna

Viena, Austria

Collaboration of Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP)  Research Laboratory, George Mason University, VA, and Department of  English and American Studies, University of Vienna.

Suggested Topics:

• Has the term reputation lost relevance in the contemporary age of intense and deep mediatization and rapid globalization of life stories and their ever-changing, elusive evaluative reception?
• If processuality and relationality of agencies in production and reception of works of culture as well as the intransparency of the medium have become of guiding interest in contemporary auto/biography studies, how might the medial production of a reputation be 
• systematically considered in processual terms?
• What is the benefit of the continuing address to the ancient category of character in discussions of ‘character assassination’? Who or what is a character in relation to personality, self, individual, protagonist, narrator, author?
• Has the term reputation become part of an elitist discourse that collides with precepts of the raceclass-gender and further categories of cultural-studies critiques? If there is an intersectionality of reputation, is there a transversality, as well?
• When politicians write autobiographies, how do the self-images created in these autobiographies relate to historiography and biography?
• How are fiction and non-fiction in auto/biography and autofiction as well as their discussion related to reputation constructions and their criticism?
• What are the relations of private and public practices of life writing with reputation building?
• How is the discussion of the mediality of works of auto/biography freshly challenged by consideration of the multimodality of the medial channels and materialities through which reputations are generated and put to political use?
• How does historiography as a genre that is still often determined by descriptions of individual lives and personalities rather than relational perspectives, and as such still committed to its derivation from protocols of biography in antiquity, benefit from the critical combination of methods and theories of Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics Studies?

For a principal orientation regarding the two fields, respectively, and as a common ground for initiation of methodological discussion, we suggest Routledge Handbook of Character/Assassination and Reputation Management/, ed. Sergei Samoilenko, Martijn Icks, Jennifer Keohane and Eric Shiraev (Routledge, in print, fall 2019), or Samoilenko, Shiraev, Keohane and Icks, Character Assassination (general) in /The Global Encyclopedia of Informality/, ed. Alena Ledeneva (UCL Press 2018) 441–445, and Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (De Gruyter 2019). Please also see the websites of IABA, the International Auto/Biography Association, and of CARP Research Lab.

We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically explixit papers that address critical questions across an international variety of works, genres, media and practices, with attention to theoretical premises of both Auto/Biography Studies and Reputation Politics Studies. Conference language will be English. Several publishers, including Macmillan, Sage, Routledge, and Taylor & Francis, have expressed interest in the publication of a volume comprising the results of the conference.

Please send proposals (600 words maximum exclusive of references) plus a short academic biography to nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at and eshiraev@gmu.edu by October 15, 2019. Notice of acceptance will be given by October 30, 2019.