Abstract
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.
Highlights
I will first examine how accounts of autofiction engage with theoretical approaches to both autobiography and fiction, before asking whether autofiction can be reconciled with existing definitions of fictionality
Narratological, and rhetorical theories of fictionality, I will aim to locate factual and fictional modes at work within texts, showing how they operate at the level of formal devices or narrative frames to foreground either referential force or the work of fictionalization
Due to the very ambiguity and hybridity of autofictional texts, they can serve as a useful empirical testing ground for theories of fiction, which have traditionally based their arguments on narratives and entities already established as generically fictional
Summary
Autofiction seems to be at odds with theories of fiction and fictionality. Serge Doubrovsky’s inaugural definition of autofiction, on the back cover of Fils (1977), arguably capitalizes on a broadly postmodern or poststructuralist consensus around the fictional status of self-narration: even if the events and facts recounted are “strictly real,” the “adventure” of language produces a fiction.1 By contrast, both semantic and pragmatic theories of fiction and fictionality, especially as they have developed since the 1990s, have tended to reaffirm the fundamental distinction between fictional and nonfictional narratives, aiming to specify the borders, the autonomy—the “distinction” as Dorrit Cohn (1999) puts it—of fiction. This dialectical approach takes theories of fiction out of their comfort zone in the novel, while attempting to bring some clarity to the debates about autofiction
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