Drew University Moodle

The critical reception to the popular and expanding body of work categorised as “autofiction” has seen it too often conflated with lightly fictionalised memoir, overlooking a long and rich literary heritage across continents and cultures. Focusing on its more recent permutations, this class will start with new definitions of the form emerging in France through Serge Doubrovksy and Nathalie Sarraute, tracking its scattered and various manifestations over the past half-century in order to recontextualise its contentious present-day paradigm, My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Working through complex ideas about identity and performance, the intersection between self-mythologisation and meta-literary practices, and straightforward accusations of the emetic, we will ask what is at stake in a declaration of truth-telling.

The syllabus will address literary failure in the autofictional films and writing of B.S. Johnson; trace the liberating influence of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, a gendered bricolage of memoir, theory and fiction, on the work of Sheila Heti; think about how to articulate negative space with Rachel Cusk; ask where the self writes from in Audre Lorde's biomythography; consider how genre and autofiction interact in Emmanuel Carrère's My Life as a Russian Novel; and reflect on contemporary autofictional flâneuries with Teju Cole's Open City and Ben Lerner's 10:04.