The study day organized at Université Marie et Louis Pasteur (Besançon) on Friday, October 16, 2026, invites scholars interested in authorial representations online and their construction through digital paratexts.

CFP: Representing the writer online : images, voices, and archives

Study day at University Marie & Louis Pasteur, Besançon

Friday, October 16, 2026

Organized by

Amélie Macaud (ELLIADD, Université Marie et Louis Pasteur)

Sahar Kheirandish (CLIMAS, Université Bordeaux Montaigne)

Magali Bigey (ELLIADD, Université Marie et Louis Pasteur)

Iconographic representations of writers are not new. Writers were photographed from the moment photography was born, from Frederick Douglass to Hemingway in the US; everyone has had their portrait taken. In 2017, the book L’Écrivain vu par la photographie : Formes, usages, enjeux directed by David Martens, Jean-Pierre Montier, and Anne Reverseau evoked the ubiquity of the writers’ portraits and the way writers used their images to create an auctorial figure.

This study day focuses on this auctorial figure, created through the author’s paratext. The paratext, defined by Gérard Genette in 1987, includes elements surrounding and adding to the text: titles, prefaces, notes, interviews, images. José-Luis Diaz coins the term “auctorial scenography” to evoke self-presentation or self-fashioning that leads to a particular reception of the writer and their work. In the digital age, these concepts have expanded significantly. Images, voices, and writers’ archives spread online, are transformed, and remediated (Bolter and Grusin), creating a collaborative digital paratext; web users participate in its creation on social media, blogs, and podcasts.

This digital paratext is not only made by authors or institutions such as publishing houses or archival libraries, but also by their readers. What Abigail DeKosnik called “rogue” archives, fans’ forums, and remediations of audio and video recordings create new paratexts and sometimes reimagine the auctorial scenography.

This study day wishes to explore first the strategies used by contemporary writers to create their auctorial scenography online, before looking at the appropriations and reconfigurations of such representations by readers.

Auctorial digital paratexts

Contemporary authors use the Internet to create their own image. They post their images on social media like Instagram, discuss their writing projects on X or Bluesky, and create blogs to share information with the public, to share their news, or simply to exchange with their readers.

Consider Ta-Nehisi Coates, who created a national readership thanks to his non-fiction writings like Between the World and Me, and “The Case for Reparations.” His active online persona on The Atlantic and Twitter preceded a notable change in his professional career: Marvel Publishing hired him as a screenwriter for their superhero series The Black Panther, a role that marked a transition and an evolution of his scenography when compared with his established reputation as a non-fiction writer.

Readers online: appropriation and remediation

Readers join the paratextual chorus online. As Beth Driscoll explains in her new book What Readers Do (2025), readers want to communicate and share their ideas about their favorite authors or books.

Rogue archives, which are non-institutional and created by readers, are one example. The site Bukowski.net gathers a database around Charles Bukowski through peer-to-peer exchanges on its forum. This digital archive was created by and for readers and fans of the author, and expands the author’s and his publishers’ paratexts. Readers also present the author’s work on social media like Reddit, Goodreads, and BookTok. They remediate the image and the voice on YouTube and Spotify, moving away from the purely visual scenography to add an audio element, leading to a different reception.

The aim of the study day is to bring together literary studies, digital humanities, and archival studies, to understand how writers’ representations circulate, transform, and are remediated online. We invite scholars who are specialists of English literary studies, digital literacy studies, fan studies, and more, to participate. The proposals may be on English-speaking writers from the anglophone world, with a special – but not exclusive – interest in United States writers.

Research angles

● Remediated images or texts (or image-texts)

● Voice as a tool for remediation

● Communication between writers and readers on social media

● Blogs (or any other media) of writers

● Private and public forums

● Textual representations (e.g., fanfictions, BookTok)

● Digital archives (non-institutional)

● Manuscripts and drafts; when the creative process becomes public paratext

● Representations by artificial intelligence

Paper proposals (300 words) with a short bio-bibliography are to be sent before May 30, 2026 to amelie.macaud@umlp.fr, sahar.kheirandish@etu.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr, and magali.bigey@univ-fcomte.fr.

Accepted papers will be announced by June 30.

Communications can be in English or French.

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