Autofiction
Autofiction is, in literary criticism, a form of fictionalized autobiography.
Definition
In autofiction, an author may decide to recount their life in the
Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils.[2] However, autofiction arguably existed as a practice with ancient roots long before Doubrovsky coined the term. Michael Skafidas argues that the first-person narrative can be traced back to the confessional subtleties of Sappho's lyric "I."[3] Philippe Vilain distinguishes autofiction from autobiographical novels in that autofiction requires a first-person narrative by a protagonist who has the same name as the author.[4] Elizabeth Hardwick's novel Sleepless Nights and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick have been deemed early seminal works popularizing the form of autofiction.[citation needed]
Uses
In India, autofiction has been associated with the works of
In a 2018 article for
The way the term is used tends to be unstable, which makes sense for a genre that blends fiction and what may appear to be fact into an unstable compound. In the past, I've tried to make a distinction in my own use of the term between autobiographical fiction, autobiographical metafiction, and autofiction, arguing that in autofiction there tends to be an emphasis on the narrator's or protagonist's or authorial alter ego's status as a writer or artist and that the book's creation is inscribed in the book itself.[8]
Notable authors
- Aldo Busi
- Amélie Nothomb
- Andrew Durbin
- Anne Wiazemsky
- Annie Ernaux
- Ayad Akhtar
- Ben Lerner
- Bret Easton Ellis
- Catherine Millet
- Charles Bukowski
- Charu Nivedita
- Chloe Delaume
- Chris Kraus
- Christine Angot
- Curzio Malaparte
- Doireann Ní Ghríofa
- Durga Chew-Bose
- Édouard Louis
- Eileen Myles
- Elizabeth Hardwick
- Emily Segal
- Emmanuel Carrère
- Emmelie Prophète
- Françoise Sagan
- Fritz Zorn
- Geoff Dyer
- Guillaume Dustan
- Henry Miller
- Hervé Guibert
- Hunter S. Thompson
- J. M. Coetzee
- Jack Kerouac
- James Baldwin
- James Joyce
- Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Lily Tuck
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
- Marcel Proust
- Marguerite Duras
- Maria Stepanova
- Megan Boyle
- Michel Houellebecq
- Natasha Stagg
- Ocean Vuong
- Oksana Vasyakina
- Olivia Rosenthal
- Patricia Lockwood
- Patrick Modiano
- Philip Roth
- Rachel Cusk
- Sheila Heti
- Sherman Alexie
- Sven Hassel
- Tao Lin
- Teju Cole
- Vanessa Springora
- Vassilis Alexakis
- Vladimir Oravsky
- V.S. Naipaul
- W.G. Sebald
- William Keepers Maxwell Jr.
See also
- Autobiografiction
- Autobiographical novel
- Biography in literature
- Fake memoir
- I-novel
- Non-fiction novel
- Roman à clef
References
- ^ Plimpton, George (16 January 1966). "The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 March 2023.
- ^ "Investigation of Autofiction & How it Operates in Gwenaelle Aubry's No One". 2017.
- S2CID 239359842.
- JSTOR 10.7312/vill15080.9.
- ^ Khan, Faizal. "My novel was treated like a song of freedom: Charunivedita". The Economic Times.
- ^ "Autofiction, By Hitomi Kanehara, trans David James Karashima". The Independent. 29 February 2008. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
- ^ "Autofiction by Hitomi Kanehara | The Skinny". theskinny.co.uk. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
- ^ Lorentzen, Christian (11 May 2018). "Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How 'Auto' Is 'Autofiction'?". Vulture.