Breaking the Chains of Genre: Narrating the Self in Autofiction
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
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| Description | I will start with a brief outline of the developments in both the practice and theory of life writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. Recent tendencies include a surging popularity of autofiction - narratives that signal both fictionality and referentiality. Widely discussed yet hard to define, the term autofiction has been applied to a wide range of texts with varying degrees of fictionalisation of the self and the life story presented. I explore examples of contemporary narratives from different literatures in an attempt to identify crucial features of the autofictional mode and to discuss its functions and effects. |