Email: writinglife2013@um.edu.mt
Website: https://www.um.edu.mt/events/writinglife2013
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/292097414242784/
Twitter: @writinglife2013
Writing Life
International Postgraduate Symposium
Palm Suite, Intercontinental Hotel, St. Julian’s, Malta
22–23 March 2013
Organised by
The Department of English
University of Malta
Sponsored by
The Strickland Foundation
Friday 22 March
8.30 – Welcome Coffee & Registration
9.00 – Welcome Address by Prof. Ivan Callus (University of Malta)
9.10 – Address by Mr Victor Aquilina (CEO of The Strickland Foundation)
9.20 – Keynote Address: Dr Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University) – Lifewriting
Chair: Giuliana Fenech
10.20 – Coffee Break
10.50 – Panels 1 & 2
Panel 1 – Writing Life Reflectively (10.50 – 12.20)
Chair: Elsa Fiott
Daria Gosek (Jagiellonian University, Poland) – Writing the Life. H.-F. Amiel and his Journal Intime
Xymena Synak-Pskit (University of Gdansk, Poland) – Masochism: Melancholia at-a-Loss, Life-at-a-Loss
Marko Stamenkovic (University of Ghent, Belgium) – Writing (One’s Own) Death
Panel 2 – Writing Life for/through the Screen (10.50 – 12.20)
Chair: Anna Camilleri
Annie Nissen (Lancaster University, UK) – Julie’s Recipe for Writing Life in Julie & Julia (2009)
Mirjana Batinid (University of Primorska, Slovenia) – Life in the Other Place
Monika Maslowska (University of Malta) – Writing for the Screen: Learning How to Portray the Lives of Others by Living
Deeply and Observing Closely from the Shadows of a Screenplay
12.20 – Break for Lunch
13.30 – Panels 3 & 4
Panel 3 – Writing Other Life (13.30 – 15.00)
Chair: Stefanie Cilia
Claudia Cremonesi (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy) – Writing about Dogs, Why Not? Flush, the Biography of
Elizabeth Barrett’s Cocker Spaniel
Melvin Chen (Cardiff University, UK) – An Axe for the Frozen Sea: Estrin's Magic Agential Realism, Insect Thigmotaxis,
and the Problem with Kafka
Charmaine Tanti (University of Malta) – Everything We Are: Reading the Human through the Vampire
Panel 4 – Written Life Remediated (13.30 – 15.00)
Chair: Giuliana Barbaro-Sant
Catherine Han (Cardiff University, UK) – How to Be a (Victorian) Domestic Goddess: Charlotte Brontë’s Entangled Life and
Art in Contemporary Jane Eyre Screen Adaptations
Claire Ellul (University of Malta) – Remediating Life: The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes
Sara Eriksson (University of Stockholm, Sweden) – The Addressee of the Diary: The Impact of Publicity upon
Representations of the Self
15.00 – Keynote Address: Prof. Carola Hilmes (University of Frankfurt am Main) – Reflections on the
Inventory Self in Texts by Gertrude Stein and Uwe Johnson
Chair: Katrin Dautel
16.00 – Coffee Break
16.30 – Panels 5 & 6
Panel 5 – Writing Life Bodily (16.30 – 18.00)
Chair: James Farrugia
Aaron Aquilina (University of Malta) – Writing Afterlife: The Exhibitionism of the Dead
Marija Grech (Cardiff University, UK) – Reading and Writing the Book of Life: Charles Darwin and the Human Genome
Project
Katrin Dautel (University of Malta) – Playground of Gender: Cross-Dressing and Self-Mutilation as Negation of Gender
Identities in Tanja Dückers’s Novel Spielzone
Panel 6 – Nineteenth-Century Ways of Writing Life (16.30 – 18.00)
Chair: Irene Scicluna
Argun Abrek Canbolat (Middle East Technical University, Turkey) – Life-Affirming Writing in Nietzsche’s Works
Maura Dunst (Cardiff University, UK) – ‘Because she could not tell the truth’: Creative Control and Autobiographical
Autonomy in New Woman Fiction
Rebecca Hutcheon (University of Bristol, UK) – Mapping the City: the problems of mimesis in George Gissing's The Nether
World
18.00 – End
20.00 – Optional Conference Dinner
Saturday 23 March
9.30 – Welcome Coffee & Registration
10.00 – Keynote Address: Prof. Manuela Rossini (University of Bern) – Re-Stitching Lives: Shelley Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl and Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’intrus
Chair: Janice Sant
11.00 – Coffee Break
11.30 – Panels 7 & 8
Panel 7 – Writing Life After Life (11.30 – 13.00)
Chair: Katryna Storace
Daniela Brockdorff (University of Malta) – Writing Death: Jim Crace’s Being Dead
Andrew Engwall (University of Malta) – Melville’s Elegy ‘Shiloh’: Writing the Divided Life
Stefanie Cilia (University of Malta) – Writing Archaeology, Writing Life: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Bog’ Poems
Panel 8 – Writing Life Transgressively (11.30 – 13.00)
Chair: Elsa Fiott
Jeffrey Micallef (University of Malta) – Condemned Life in Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead
Viktoria Grivina (Karazin Kharkov National University, Ukraine) – A Single Injection of Radioactive Past Times: Cut-up
Theory of William S. Burroughs
Maria Theuma (University of Malta) – ‘I got 99 problems but a b**** ain’t one’: Confession, Reality and Story in Rap
Music
13.00 – Break for Lunch
14.00 – Panels 9 & 10
Panel 9 – (Re-)Writing Life (and Death) in Contemporary Narrative (14.00 – 15.30)
Chair: Rachelle Gauci
Corinne Vella (University of Malta) – Mr Baverstock, Nicola Barker and My Ideologies
Conrad Aquilina (Durham University, UK) – ‘If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending’: Revisionism,
Representation and the Re-Written Life
James Farrugia (University of Malta) – Life and Nothing (To Be Frightened Of)
Panel 10 – Writing Life Beyond Limits (14.00 – 15.30)
Chair: Leanne Borg
Caleb Sivyer (Cardiff University, UK) – Visualising Queer Life in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve: Cinema,
Scopophilia, and the Sutured Subject
Aysegul Salamis Sentug (Independent Scholar) – New Forms of Fiction in the Modern Age: Does Meta-Fiction Pose Any
Special Problems for Philosophical Theories of Fiction?
Janice Sant (Cardiff University, UK) – In Absentia: Fictional Testimony in Hélène Cixous’s The Day I Wasn’t There
15.30 – Coffee Break
16.00 – Panels 11 & 12
Panel 11 – Aesthetic Autobiography (16.00 – 17.30)
Chair: Andrew Engwall
Katryna Storace (University of Malta) – Writing For Her Life: Virginia Woolf and Autobiographical Memory in ‘A Sketch of
the Past’
Aykun Ozgen (Sabanci University, Turkey) – Writing Life Writerly: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul as an Aesthetic Autobiography
Mohsen Jabbari (University of Tehran, Iran) – The Fact, the Truth, and the Real: Elizabeth Bishop and Confessional Poetry
Panel 12 – Writing Ephemeral Life (16.00 – 17.30)
Chair: Aaron Aquilina
Omar Basalamah (King Abdulaziz University, Saudia Arabia) – Writng Characters: Textual (De)Construction of Identities in
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
Naomi Kruger (Lancaster University, UK) – ‘Storyless Spaces’: Contemporary Dementia Fiction and the Difficulty of
Narrative
Irene Scicluna (University of Malta) – In Sickness and In Health; Till Death Do Us Part: Art, Disease and Posthumanism
17.30 – Closing Address & Thanks – Dr James Corby, Ms Giuliana Fenech and the Writing Life Team
18.00 – End of Symposium
18.30 onwards – Optional Post-Conference Drinks and Discussion