NARRATING LIVES The narration of lives surrounds us. As a genre, it extends from antiquity to the present, from hagiography to confessional television, from letters and diaries to blogs. It exists in every continent and culture. The study of life narrative also involves us as scholars. The stories of our professional lives help expose the work of humanities in the world. The 2011 MLA convention in Los Angeles will feature some sixty sessions, listed inside, devoted to different aspects of this groundbreaking Presidential Forum theme. I hope you’ll be able to attend some of them, and I look forward to seeing you there. Sidonie Smith 2010 MLA President 336. Lives and Archives: Giving, Taking, and Circulating Testimony 3:30–4:45 p.m., Platinum Salon C, J. W. Marriott A linked session arranged in conjunction with the Presidential Forum. Presiding: William Leake Andrews, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 1. “‘What Was I?’: Literary Witness and the Testimonial Imperative,” Leigh Gilmore, Scripps Coll. 2. “Needing Permission to Write: Human Subject Research,” William Craig Howes, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Maˉnoa 3. “Letters from Nowhere,” Gillian L. Whitlock, Univ. of Queensland 505. Lives and Archives in Graphic and Digital Modes 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Platinum Salon C, J. W. Marriott Narrating Lives is the theme of the Presidential A linked session arranged in conjunction with the Forum at the 2011 MLA Annual Convention. Presidential Forum. Presiding: Julia Watson, Ohio State Univ., Columbus The following are the programs for the 1. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives,” Hillary L. Presidential Forum and its linked sessions. Chute, Harvard Univ. 2. “Automedial Ghosts,” Brian Rotman, Ohio State Univ., Columbus 3. “What Is Worth Saving? The Salvage Work of Presidential Forum Comics,” Theresa Tensuan, Haverford Coll. Friday, 7 January 207. Lives and Archives: Finding, Framing, Presidential Forum Participants and Circulating Narrated Lives Now William Leake Andrews 10:15 a.m.–12:00 noon, Platinum Salon D, J. W. Marriott The Presidential Forum. Presiding: Sidonie Smith, Univ. is E. Maynard Adams Professor of Michigan, Ann Arbor of English and Comparative Literature and senior associate 1. “Lives beyond Archives,” Marianne Hirsch, dean for the Fine Arts and Columbia Univ.; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth Coll. Humanities at the University of 2. “Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives?” Françoise Lionnet, North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Univ. of California, Los Angeles He is the author of The Literary 3. “Between Lost and Found,” Nancy K. Miller, Career of Charles W. Chesnutt and Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York To Tell a Free Story: The First 4. “Virtual Vérité,” Chon A. Noriega, Univ. of Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. He California, Los Angeles is coeditor of The Oxford Companion to African American 5. “Embedded Lives: The House of Fiction, the House Literature and The Norton Anthology of African American of History,” David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford Univ. Literature and general editor of North American Slave 6. “Vandalizing Life Writing at Illinois: Heap of Narratives. He won the Norman Foerster Prize from Birds’s Signs of Indigenous Life,” Robert Warrior, American Literature in 1976 and the William Riley Univ. of Illinois, Urbana Parker Prize from PMLA in 1990. Hillary L. Chute is Neubauer William Craig Howes is director Family Assistant Professor in of the Center for Biographical the English department at the Research, coeditor of the journal University of Chicago. Her book Biography: An Interdisciplinary Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Quarterly, and professor of English Contemporary Comics examines at the University of Hawai‘i, Maˉnoa. the work of Aline Kominsky- His book Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Witnesses to Their Fight was a Choice Barry, Marjane Satrapi, and Notable Book, and his coedited collection Teaching Alison Bechdel. She is coeditor of the special issue of Life Writing Texts was published in the Options for Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies on graphic narrative. She Teaching series by the MLA. A coproducer of the is associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s forthcoming television documentary series Biography Hawai‘i, he MetaMaus, and her work has appeared in American is the list manager for IABA-L, the principal source Periodicals, F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, PMLA, of information for members of the International Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, Autobiography and Biography Association. Literature and Medicine, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Françoise Lionnet teaches Leigh Gilmore is professor of French, francophone, and English at Ohio State University and comparative literature at the the first holder of an endowed chair in University of California, Los gender and women’s studies at Scripps Angeles, and codirects the Mellon College. She is the author of The Limits postdoctoral program Cultures in of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony Transnational Perspective. She is and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of president-elect of the American Comparative Literature Women’s Self-Representation and coeditor Association. Her books include Postcolonial Representations: of Autobiography and Postmodernism. She has published Women, Literature, Identity and Autobiographical Voices: articles on autobiography and feminist theory in Feminist Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture; the coedited volumes Minor Studies, Signs, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Biography, Transnationalism and The Creolization of Theory; and American Imago, Genders, and numerous collections. the forthcoming The Indies, Otherwise: Creolization and Transcolonial Comparison. Her special issue Between Words Marianne Hirsch and Images: The Culture of Mauritius is forthcoming from is William the International Journal of Francophone Studies. Recent Peterfied Trent Professor of English essays appear in French Forum, Yale French Studies, and and Comparative Literature at French Global: A New Approach to Literary History. Columbia University and codirector of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. Her Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished current interests include cultural Professor of English and Comparative memory, testimony, and photography. Literature at the Graduate Center, She is coauthor, with Leo Spitzer, of Ghosts of Home: City University of New York. The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory; author The subjects of her books follow a of The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, trajectory from The Heroine’s Text: Feminism and Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, Readings in the French and English and Postmemory; and editor or coeditor of Conflicts in Novel; Subject to Change: Reading Feminism, The Familial Gaze, Teaching the Representation Feminist Writing; and the edited of the Holocaust, and the forthcoming Rites of Return. Poetics of Gender to her most recent books, But Enough about Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives and the coedited collection Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. The memoir “Out of Breath” is the prequel to all of the above. Chon A. Noriega is professor in Sidonie Smith, the MLA the Department of Film, Television, president, is Martha Guernsey Colby and Digital Media and director of Collegiate Professor of English the Chicano Studies Research Center and Women’s Studies and chair at the University of California, Los of the Department of English at Angeles. He is the author of Shot the University of Michigan, Ann in America: Television, the State, and Arbor. She was a member of the the Rise of Chicano Cinema, coauthor MLA Executive Council from 2000 of Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, to 2003. Her research interests and editor of nine books, two book series, and Aztlán: include autobiography studies, feminist theories, and A Journal of Chicano Studies. His awards include the women’s literature. Among her recent publications Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, are Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of the Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Recognition (coauthored with Kay Schaffer); Moving Lives: Fellowship, and the Ann C. Rosenfield Distinguished Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing; and Reading Community Partnership Prize. Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (coauthored with Julia Watson). David Palumbo-Liu is professor of comparative literature Leo Spitzer is the Vernon at Stanford University. He is the Professor of History emeritus coeditor, with Nirvana Tanoukhi and Brownstone Professor of and Bruce Robbins, of Immanuel Jewish Studies at Dartmouth Wallerstein and the Problem of the College. His interests range from World: Culture, Scale, System and questions concerning emancipation is completing The Deliverance and reactions to exclusion and of Others: Reading Literature in an Age of Globalization. domination in Latin America, He is the founding editor of the e-journal Occasion: Africa, and Central Europe to issues Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. of historical memory, refugeehood, and representations of trauma in photography. He is coauthor of Ghosts of Home: Brian Rotman The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory and author has a doctorate of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from in mathematics from London Nazism and Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality University and is Humanities in Austria, Brazil, and West Africa. He coedited Acts of Distinguished Professor in the Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio