autofiction Archive
How We Read Autofiction
Autobiography is straightforward in a way that autofiction is not: in this case, the prefix “auto,” or self, pairs easily with the suffix “biography,” or life story. An autobiography tells the self’s life story. But what does it mean to tell a fiction of the self?
Poetic Counterpoints: Emmanuelle Guattari’s I, Little Asylum
In I, Little Asylum, Emmanuelle Guattari reflects on her childhood at La Borde, an experimental psychiatric clinic founded in 1951 in the Loire Valley, France. Are the textures of this novel cum memoir particular to its setting? Can we detect in the book’s rhythm and style anything that directly
The Readers: William H. Gass and Documenting the Self
Behaving authentically in the world is never easy or straightforward; critics like William Gass show us, among many other things, that we are not alone in these questions of authenticity, and that we never really have been.