Priscilla Gac-Artigas, Ph.D., professor of Spanish and Latin American literature in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, is the editor of a new volume of essays titled “Collectfiction: Pushing the Limits of Autofiction / Colectficción: sobrepasando los límites de la autoficción,” published in July 2022 by Iberoamericana/Vervuert (Madrid).
The essays provide a considerable corpus of works that invite the reader to move beyond what Manuel Alberca describes as the “stagnation” of autofiction and to advance the theorization of ‘collectfiction,’ a term coined by Gac-Artigas in 2017 to describe a new way of narrating reality(ies) and fiction(s), of telling and reconfiguring stories. According to Gac-Artigas, “In this act of creation the restrictive confines of the “I” inherent to autofiction are transgressed for the sake of an encompassing and political ‘we,’ and the reader becomes a part and a participant in the reconfiguration of a story in its time-space dimension.”
She continued, “The multidimensional richness of the works included—geographical diversity of the authors studied and of the contributors, interdisciplinarity of the creative expressions analyzed (literature, film, art, and photography), and the inclusion of necessary and timely analyses of gay and trans literature—make of this volume a spearhead in the study of this new itinerary followed by authors and artists of Hispanic origin since the late 20th century; a creative way that calls for creators and audiences to join in the reconfiguration of the collectfiction of an era.”
The volume includes essays on the following authors: Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Mario Levrero, Laura Alcoba, Patricio Pron, Gustavo Gac-Artigas, Cristina Rivera Garza, Camila Sosa Villada, Fernando Vallejo, Juan José Arreola, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Paul Auster, and the artists Sophie Calle, Guillermo Núñez, and Oliver Laxe.
Iberoamericana/Vervuert (Madrid) is a leading publishing house in the field of academic studies on Iberian and Latin American literature. The catalog of Iberoamericana includes prominent writers on autofiction of the Hispanic world: Manuel Alberca, Ana Casas, Vera Toro, Sergio Blanco, Patricia López-Gay, among others. Iberoamericana/Vervuert ranks third among all the publishers of academic books in Spain according to the ranking made by SPI: Scholarly Publishers Indicators in Humanities and Social Sciences.
Gac-Artigas is a researcher and professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Monmouth University. She is a Fulbright Scholar, a full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE by its Spanish acronym), a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and a member of the Academic Council of the CEANLE (ANLE Studies Center). She has published numerous articles on women writers, and Latinx and Latin American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has also written on teaching critical-thinking skills through creative writing. Her most recent research projects center on the analysis and theorization of collectfiction. She is also an editor and translator of poetry from Spanish into French and English.