Reading Autofiction: The Cognitive Turn

Abstract

Reading AutofictionThe Cognitive Turn Alison Gibbons (bio) Writing about autofiction in The Guardian, Rebecca Watson christens the 2010s, in the words of the article’s title, as the “decade we’ve become obsessed with reading—and writing—about ourselves” (2019). This obsession did not end at the stroke of midnight as the fireworks heralded 2020’s beginning. Rather, readers continue to experience what Jessica Winter, in her New York Times article of the same name, calls “our autofiction fixation” (2021): in other words, we enjoy reading autobiographical traces, even in works labeled as fiction. As these articles demonstrate, discussions of autofiction in the popular press frequently point out that readers have a literary appetite for autofiction. Yet despite this, academic criticism of autofiction has predominantly traced the historical development of the genre, debating the provenance of its name and considering its major themes. Only more recently are a select few scholars turning their attention to the innovative and important question of how readers experience and approach such works. To be clear, earlier research in autobiography and life writing was not uninterested in readers. In his highly influential essay “The Autobiographical Pact,” printed in English in On Autobiography (1987), Philippe Lejeune takes pains to state that his theorization of the differences between fiction and autobiography begins “from the position of the reader.” Thus, while Lejeune maps the stylistic properties that signal to a reader that they are entering into either an autobiographical or a fictional contract with a work’s author, he does so by considering the influence of textual features on a reader’s felt sense of a work’s fictional or nonfictional status. In this sense, for Lejeune, “the reader often tends to think of himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches of contract (whatever the contract).” Likewise, in Touching the Void: Reference in Autobiography (1992), Paul John Eakin feels “no doubt that readers do read autobiographies differently from other kinds of texts, especially works they take to be ‘fictions.’” Without meaning to discredit the writings of Lejeune and Eakin (both of whose thinking I greatly admire and have found extremely influential), what differentiates them as the old guard [End Page 32] from an emerging vanguard of scholars interested in life writing’s readers is what we might speak of a nascent cognitive turn in the study of autofiction. In The Phenomenology of Autobiography (2017), Arnaud Schmitt draws on some cognitively informed research to offer philosophical reflections on autofictional and autobiographical reading experiences. Schmitt rebuffs claims that autofiction is a hybrid genre in which fiction and autobiography blend indistinguishably. Rather, he claims that autofictions have a dominant frame of interpretation—fiction—within which exist “visible ‘junctions’ with a remote reality, like a distant horizon with no real consequence for the readers’ interpretive frames.” In Schmitt’s view, when readers encounter a historical figure in fiction, such as a version of the real author, “source tagging” allows them to recognize that these characters have a basis in reality. However, “the more the historical person will linger in the fiction and interact with the fictional characters, the more she or he will be modified semantically.” Consequently, he argues that reading autofiction (and autobiography) as referential nonfiction requires “additional cognitive effort.” To capture this effort, Schmitt proposes the concept of “emersion”: this signals readers’ rejection of a total immersion in the narrative world by instead undertaking a “a form of resistance, a refusal to lose track of the reality beyond the text, as opposed to the reality of the text.” In contrast, in the chapter “A Cognitive Perspective on Autofictional Writing, Texts, and Reading” in the collection The Autofictional, edited by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (2022), Effe and I do not restrict readers’ interpretations to a global frame of fiction. Instead, we take our cue from the many preceding theorizations of autofiction that discuss it as vacillating between fictionality and factuality and from studies in experimental psychology showing that readers treat fictional and nonfictional texts differently. Effe and I adopt the construct of “cognitive schemas” from cognitive science, which models the conceptual bundles we use to organize our knowledge and that can consequently influence expectations...