Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story so Far

Dix, Hywel

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-89902-2_1

Cited by 13 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…These pertain to the permeability of existing genre categorisations and hybrid forms, such as autofiction. 10 In recent years, life writing and autobiography studies have seen a surge in criticism that develops more differentiated ways of assessing the increasingly blurry genre boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, novel and memoir, biography and autobiography, and combinations thereof. Conventions of strict categorisation have been criticised in favour of notions that account for the permeability between text types that fall into the broad spectrum of life writing.…”

Section: Lateness and Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

Schuh

2020

EJLW

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In Summertime, a fictional biographer, Mr Vincent, conducts interviews with contemporaries of the novelist J.M. Coetzee for a biography of the late author. However, every claim made about the late Coetzee by the characters in Summertime is composed by the author himself, so the hidden, yet obvious presence of the novelist gives the book’s supposedly biographical outlook an autobiographical twist. Summertime’s Coetzee is distinctly both alive and dead. I propose to analyse works such as Summertime as literary autobiographies that employ narrative strategies otherwise found in fiction in order to creatively explore lateness, belatedness, and a sense of ending with regard to their writing life. Performative contradiction, as a deliberate stylistic manifestation of paradoxical contradictions, is a result of such narrative strategies. This enables a portrayal of memory and sincerity in autobiography that acknowledges the fraught nature of these notions. Drawing on autobiographical writing by novelists, such as Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Günter Grass, this article analyses the use of tense and fictionality to create performative contradiction. It shows how the novelist’s memory and imagination engage with the ever-present possibility of death to subvert traditional ideas of lateness as well as perceived limitations to the temporality of autobiographical writing.

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Section: Lateness and Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

Schuh

2020

EJLW

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Lerner, Ben

Gibbons¹

2022

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020

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“The Pragmatics of Autofiction”

Schmitt

2022

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

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The aim of this chapter is to compare the pragmatics of autofiction in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future, two authors who, in dissimilar but also very similar ways, use autofictional strategies to refer to their personal lives and background without playing the autobiographical game “by the rules.” Focusing on how pragmatically they both create a sense of autofiction, a distinction will be established between primary criteria and secondary ones, essential signals without which an autofictional text cannot be identified as such and “enhancers” meant to strengthen the necessary ambiguity inherent in autofictional readings.

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Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story so Far

Cited by 13 publications

References 12 publications

‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

Lerner, Ben

“The Pragmatics of Autofiction”

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