'Life Writing' is a term that is wonderfully broad, and worryingly vague. At its most productive, it forces us to interrogate what exactly we mean by life, what and who we include and exclude, and, when coupled with the word writing, who or what is worthy of having their life recorded, and what is the relationship between the lives of the inscribers and the lives of the inscribed, or the pact between reader and writer, which Philippe Lejeune identified as the core of autobiographical practice. The age of social media, the virtual and the digital, has changed the landscape of life writing. Our carefully curated second lives on Facebook and Instagram illustrate what deft practitioners of the dark arts of self-inscription and self-curation we are. The corollary of this digitally intensified self-inscription is, ironically, that the private life appears to be dead. Which leads one to wonder what the stuff of future biographies and autobiographies will be.

But none of this even begins to do justice to what thinking about Life Writing might involve. The people who have engaged with the cluster so far, either as speakers or as audience respondents, are involved in life writing in many different ways, and it is this plenitude of approaches that will advance the theoretical consideration of Life Writing. It seems easier to ask what is not life writing than to offer any adequate definition of what it is. Nevertheless, many people at UCC are engaged in projects that come under the auspices of life writing, whether or not they have ever used that term.

If you are interested in making a contribution within this cluster, please contact Rachel MagShamhráin at rmgs@ucc.ie 

Recent events