Meta-Autobiographical Forms of Autofiction
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper discusses autofiction or “the autofictional” as a strategy that can occur across different genres and media. I argue that as opposed to inevitable construction and inaccuracy involved in any life narrative, autofiction employs fictionality consciously and deliberately towards a rhetorical end, while not fully cancelling autobiographical reference. Such deliberate transgressions of the border between factuality and fictionality may serve to highlight the constructed nature of all autobiographical narrative, to challenge conventional notions of “truth,” or to draw attention to the ongoing process of self-invention. I introduce Czech writer Jan Němec’s work Possibilities of a Love Novel (2019) as an example of meta-autobiographical autofiction that stages an attempt at autobiographical utterance and simultaneously thematises the difficulties such attempts entail. |
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