Dear Colleague,

The January 2011 convention in Los Angeles promises to be a groundbreaking

event as we transition to new meeting dates and new formats to showcase
presentations and encourage dialogue. For it, I invite you to consider how you
might collaborate in the Presidential Forum theme, a tradition begun by Marjorie
Perloff in 2006 and continued by every president since. The 2011 theme will be
“Narrating Lives.”

The narration of lives surrounds us, from the banal forms of contemporary
confessional television to the afterlives of forms inherited from the ancient
Greeks and Romans. It extends across the globe, to traditions of life writing in
China, North Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. It emerges digitally in
modes of online life storytelling. “Narrating Lives” captures this diversity of
genres and media, encompassing medieval hagiography, letters, diaries,
narratives of exploration and colonization, autobiographical and biographical
texts, lyric cycles, and autobiographical fiction as well as the pictographs of
native peoples, the oral traditions of indigenous peoples, testimonial witnessing,
performance art, graphic memoirs, blogs, and autoethnography.

Exploring the narration of lives engages broad theoretical issues of trauma and
memory, authenticity and truth telling, ethical accountability, modes of
intersubjectivity, remediation, and the cultural uses of narration. It foregrounds
temporal and geographic dimensions of the traffic in lives and narratives
through reception studies and studies of transnational and translational routes of
circulation. And it tests methodological approaches to narration, reading
practices, and reading communities.

The points of entry to narrating lives open connections to colleagues in other

disciplines, from neuroscience and cognition studies to art, architecture, history,
and law. “Narrating Lives” also relates directly to the work of the MLA. In
narrative forms such as task force reports, the MLA assembles membership
stories of the professional lives of language and literature scholars in changing
times. Far from directing us inward, focusing on life narration—and building
archives of life stories for future generations—exposes the work of the
humanities in the world.

“Narrating Lives” seeks to address the range of these scholarly interests and
stories. Forms for submitting program copy for all sessions will contain a box for
organizers to indicate whether the session should be considered for inclusion in
the presidential theme. These forms will be available on the MLA Web site in
January. Selected sessions will be listed in a brochure along with sessions that
compose the Presidential Forum, which will be published in print and on the
MLA Web site. I would be grateful for your help in identifying potential
contributions to the theme of “Narrating Lives,” although I cannot include all
proposed sessions. As we strive for diverse formats for the 2011 convention, I
encourage you to propose alternative types of panels on this theme.

The 2011 convention will usher in a new calendar and introduce exciting new
formats. Although many of us face diminished support for conference travel, I
hope that you will be able to make coming to Los Angeles a priority. I look
forward to seeing you there.

Cordially,

Sidonie Smith