Palgrave Studies in Life Writing - The Autofictional
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AbstractAutofiction has often been viewed as a hybrid of autobiography and the novel. This chapter argues that a new generation of writers who emerged from the 1990s onward drew heavily on the diary instead of autobiography to develop their own innovative autofictional forms and practices. Whereas some critics have argued that the diary is fundamentally attached to truth and resistant to fiction, Hervé Guibert’s Voyage avec deux enfants (“Journey with Two Children,” 1982) and Christine Angot’s Léonore, toujours (“Léonore, Always,” 1993) provide two examples of experimental writing projects where the diary provides the means for new modalities of truth and fiction, allowing the authors to adopt a new relation to their writing and the real world.

AbstractThis chapter examines a new form of autofiction that has emerged in the twenty-first century, which the chapter proposes to call metanarrative autofiction. Such writing displays awareness of how our ways of narrating our lives are socially, culturally, and historically conditioned. The chapter conceptualizes metanarrativity in this context as a form of self-reflexive storytelling that makes narrative its theme, reflecting not only on the process of its own narration but also on the roles of cultural narrative models in making sense of our lives. The chapter discusses affordances of metanarrative autofiction in Annie Ernaux’s Les Années (The Years) (2008), Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min kamp (My Struggle) (2009–2011), and the Finnish singer-songwriter Astrid Swan’s Viimeinen kirjani (2019, My Last Book).

AbstractThis chapter offers a discussion of three texts by bicultural Egyptian writers: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Radwa Ashour’s Specters (1999), and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010). The three works are read via an autofictional lens, with focus on Ghali’s autofictional identity, Ashour’s autofictional threads, and al-Tahawy’s autofictionalizing experience. The study suggests that autofictionality can be identified in the texts in terms of genre as well as technique, demonstrating the potential of the autofictional as a literary strategy in negotiating identity, memory, and experience in the writing of Egyptian literature. Our reading of the three texts testifies to the affordance of an autofictional lens in reading Arabic literature and allows new insights into writing at the intersection of reality and the imagination.

AbstractThe introduction takes as its starting point autofiction’s continuing resistance to a consensus definition and suggests that this has to do with the ad-hoc invention of the term but also with the fact that autofictional texts tend to challenge and transform generic conventions. The chapter proposes embracing the slipperiness of the concept by purposefully extending its scope to encompass a wide range of autofictional phenomena. These include the diverse affordances of the autofictional as an aesthetic strategy and a theoretical lens and the many shapes it can take as it interacts with different forms and media. The chapter discusses the heretofore geographically and linguistically limited focus of autofiction research and advocates a more global perspective, which promises to enrich our understanding of the autofictional.

AbstractThis chapter approaches serial literary autofictions as a distinct variant of autofictional writing. While discussions of life writing often focus on male authors, the chapter redresses this imbalance by considering women writers, specifically the works of Dorothy Richardson, Doris Lessing, and Rachel Cusk. The approach is new in exploring the autofictional in serial, literary works, and tracing connections across an author’s oeuvre. Such a focus leads to an extended understanding of autofiction and the autofictional as challenging autobiographical unity and coherence. The chapter distinguishes between different forms of seriality (including series, serial, and serialized life narratives), and argues that serial publications and structures enhance literary and autofictional tendencies in that they draw attention to the complexities of autobiographical representation.

AbstractThis chapter explores the shared characteristics, both in terms of thematic concerns and narrative structures and strategies, of autofiction and the distinct Japanese form of the I-novel, shishōsetsu. Focusing on the works of three contemporary Japanese writers, Kanai Mieko, Sagisawa Megumu, and Mizumura Minae, it examines the narrative strategies applied by female authors to redefine the self. The chapter focuses on the traits shared by shishōsetsu and autofiction: the ambiguity of first-person narratives such as the semantics of “I” within the text; the interdependence of author, narrator, and protagonist; the practices of fictionalizing the self; and the question of authorship. Exploring shishōsetsu as an autofictional form also expands the scope of existing theoretical discussions on the autofictional, which rarely take Japanese literature into consideration.

AbstractThis chapter examines three recent autofictional documentaries produced in Argentina and Spain—Albertina Carri’s Cuatreros (Rustlers), Mercedes Álvarez’s Mercado de futuros (Futures Market), and Víctor Erice’s Vidros partidos (Broken Windows)—which share a distinctive “archival impulse.” These films propose a meaning in a specific political sense which we read in relation to the contexts of the Iberian financial crisis and the memories of political violence during the last dictatorship in Argentina. We address the autofictional strategies through which the filmmakers “re-stage” the archive by adopting an aesthetics of ambiguity that unsettles the modern paradigm of the archive as static evidence of a given reality, revolving instead around a conception of the archive as a self-reflective process that becomes the subject matter in its own right.

AbstractAutofiction and theories of fiction seem to be at odds. Whereas the notion of autofiction capitalizes on a postmodern consensus regarding the fictional status of self-narration, recent theoretical approaches to fiction and fictionality have reaffirmed the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narratives. It is possible to move beyond this impasse, however, by drawing on narratological and rhetorical theories of fictionality to describe the precise forms and degrees of fictionality and fictionalization discernable in works received as autofiction. Different configurations of the fact/fiction relationship can produce various autofictional effects, and theory can help us locate sites of fictionalization and factualization within literary works. Conversely, the ambiguity and hybridity of autofictional texts serve as a useful empirical testing ground for theories of fiction and fictionality.

AbstractVisual autofiction can be seen as a storytelling method used by contemporary visual artists to initiate cultural inclusion within a field that has historically favored Western narratives and excluded many others. This chapter, which builds on theoretical reflections on autofiction, contends that contemporary artists endeavor to be culturally included in broad, decolonized visual narratives, through the use of innovative visual autofictional methods to represent their experiences. In the case of South African visual artist Bontle Tau, autofiction is used as a strategy to construct a multiform and multifaceted photographic narrative that foregrounds the diversity of selves and stories, further supporting the overall aim of cultural inclusion within representations in the field.

AbstractThis chapter argues that the contemporary British writer Jenny Diski and the Modernist French photographer and writer Claude Cahun are both literary self-portraitists, as this term is defined by Michel Beaujour. This is evident in their similar approaches to the themes of masquerade, narcissism, and naming. By reading Diski’s The Dream Mistress and Cahun’s Disavowals in the light of Julia Kristeva’s account of narcissism, as well as theories of autofiction and self-portraiture, the chapter further contends that self-portraiture arises from a distinct conception of the self, and of the psychological origins of artistic creativity. On this basis, it can be contrasted with autofiction, and autofiction and self-portraiture can then be seen to be related to each other as the two poles of contemporary life-writing.