Wayne State Humanities Center, Faculty/Administration Building 2339, February 2, 2016, at 12:30 p.m.

We have a cultural fixation with borders and boundaries: their crossings, their rigidity, and where they blur. How does this recent capturing of our cultural imagination manifest itself in contemporary literature, both in content and form? How do authors negotiate the boundary between the self who writes and the self who appears on the page? This talk will explore these questions, focusing primarily on the work of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante; examine literature whose form blurs boundaries, particularly the recently popularized phenomenon of autofiction; and discuss ways in which the concept of boundaries appears in the novelist’s own creative work, particularly her novel-in-progress, which is set in Athens, Greece.