AUTO— 

The RCA MA Writing Programme provides unique opportunities for postgraduate students to develop high-level writing, research and analytical skills in the setting of one of the world’s most dynamic art schools. Combining workshop models of teaching and learning, and public-facing projects with leading arts organisations, the MA provides the skills required for a successful career in writing, the arts, or a research degree.The Contemporary Art Practice Programme offers a discursive environment in which to discuss contemporary issues for thinking about, making and displaying fine art. We deliver this via four pathways: Critical Practice, Moving Image, Performance and Public Sphere.

Writing Programme and Performance pathway (CAP), Royal College of Art

'Autofiction is like a dream; a dream is not life, a book is not life,' wrote Serge Doubrovsky in his 1977 novel, Fils, which is often cited as the origin of the term 'autofiction'. Recent years have seen Doubrovksy invoked time and again to address a new writerly preoccupation with a seemingly old genre. Some trace autofiction back to Joyce or Proust, to the Confessions of Rousseau, and Augustine before him, or even further, to Hesiod’s Works and Days. 'How ‘Auto’ is ‘Autofiction?' asks a recent article; and 'Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?' 
But what is at stake in these contemporary conversations, and what are the conditions that have produced them? What is the balance between the 'auto' (autobiography, memoir, and 'the self' in general) and the 'fiction'? Is the distinction between fact and fiction, the truth and the fabricated? Or is there, increasingly, a desire to redistribute the relation between the self and fiction: the question of how to live or how to create as reflexively embedded with the process of making itself? Autofiction as a term — a practice, a concern, a process — remains mobile and in flux, perhaps telling us more about what we want from a work of art than its sometimes plainly stated aims and origins. So just what is it that makes today’s autofiction so different, so appealing?
<A HREF="https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/auto/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">This two-day conference</A>, featuring keynote speaker Anne Boyer, aims to generate a critical and creative discourse around ideas, practices, theories, contradictions, arguments, refutations, histories — and more! — of the AUTO— as it relates to creative works. We hope to wrangle with and refine its usage, which can sometimes seem catch-all; and we will also consider the ways in which these conversations relate and spill into other genres and disciplines. 
** Free for current RCA students and staff, please book using your RCA email address. One ticket per person! 
SCHEDULE
23 MAY
10.00: Registration
10.30-10.45: Welcome, Introduction
10.45-12.15: Looking forward, looking back
Tom Overton: ‘an orphan form’: John Berger and Autobiography
Hannah van Hove: ‘A lot of gestures to unlearn’: Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End Of and the writing of (auto)fiction
Kaye Mitchell: Empathy, Intersubjectivity and the Feminist Politics of the AUTO—
Martin Schauss: Autofiction By Any Other Means: Experiments in Citation and Form
Brian Dillon: chair
12.15-12.30: Coffee + tea break
12.30-1.00: Performance
Roy Claire Potter: Is This What I’m Supposed to Be Doing?
1.00-2.00: Lunch
2.00-3.30: Cross-, Anti-, Inter-discipline
Philomena Epps: Life or Theatre? Visual Autofiction and Feminism
Catherine Damman: The Work of Art in the Age of Half-Hearted Reproducibility
Lauren Fournier: Performing Philosophy for the Camera: Autotheory and Artists’ Video in Turtle Island, 1969-2019
Emily LaBarge: chair
3.30-3.45: Coffee + tea break
3.45-5.15: Writing, reading, performing AUTO—
Adjoa Armah: I know you’re you, but can’t you just try to be me sometimes?
Joanne Tatham: The Bitter Cup
Joanna Walsh: A Woman Sitting In Front of a Screen: User Manifesto
Sally O'Reilly: chair  
5.15-6.00: Break  
6.00-7.15: Screening
Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses (61 minutes)
With an introduction by Hannah Paveck
 
24 MAY
10: Introduction
10.15-11.45: Between AUTO— and a hard place
Claire-Louise Bennett
Heike Geissler
Brian Dillon
Kishani Widyaratna, chair
11.45-12: Coffee + tea break
12-1: Screening
David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Finding Fanon trilogy (45 min)
With an introduction by Annie Kwan 
1-2: Lunch
2-3.30: Subject to AUTO—
Rosanna Mclaughlin
Mira Mattar
Maija Timonen
Juliet Jacques, chair
3.30-3.45: Coffee + tea break 
3.45-5: Keynote
Anne Boyer
 5-6.30: Drinks reception

Royal College of Art

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AUTO—

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