My-selves/Our-self: the potential of contemporary autofiction

Abstract

Consistently at the top of most major literary awards, autofictional works have reportedly gathered the praise of the general public while simultaneously earning the reputation of being an overemployed, shallow take on autobiography. Existing in a liminal space between two distinct literary genres, autofictional writings violate the rules of autobiography as stated by Lejeune, posing a challenge to the orders of epistemology and forcing the reader into a double-binding contract within the framework of the narrative. To counter the allegations made against the genre, this thesis will comparatively analyse two case studies - namingly: “Outline”, first book of its homonymous trilogy by Rachel Cusk, and Nobel Prize winner John M. Coetzee’s “Diary of a Bad Year”- according to the rules of narratological analysis of the text and paratext, following both conventional and more recent discoveries, in an attempt to extrapolate the recurring patterns and noteworthy exceptions which make these two acutely distant works fall within the same category, while simultaneously giving a diachronic account on the evolution of the autofictional practice. By highlighting how a selected number of structural and stylistic features respond to wide-spread concerns about human selfhood, and employing recent theories on life writings, this study aims to explain these literary phenomena’s rise in popularity under the lens of reader response analysis and a revaluation of the writer persona.