Reading and Writing: Autofiction

Course Description

Summary

What is Autofiction?

The term “autofiction” originated in France in the late 1970s to describe a certain kind of knowing, renegade, and mock-heroic school of autobiographical fiction that fell somewhere between the nihilistic experimentalism of William Burroughs and the lavish literary recall of Marcel Proust. It was “writing before or after literature,” the writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky claimed, meaning that its artistic project is so instinctive and yet also so unfamiliar that it lives outside of what we have come to call “literature”—and the ordinary critical terms we have to describe its relatives (autobiographical fiction, bildungsroman, thinly veiled memoir, etc.) no longer apply. It is a “fiction,” Doubrovsky theorized, “of events and facts strictly real.” But how can autofiction be both “fiction” and a literature based on the “strictly real”? Isn’t fiction made up, i.e. fiction? Wouldn't a literature based in “events and facts strictly real” just be catagorized as memoir or autobiography? We will explore the fundamental contradictions of this genre—and others—as we subject a range of literary texts that may or may not qualify as works of ‘autofiction,’ as Doubrovsky defined it, to close reading, with a particular emphasis on contemporary writers who have helped fuel the current autofiction ‘boom’ (Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elif Batuman).