Abstract

While the twentieth century overall witnessed an unprecedented flood of autobiographies and critical accounts that validated autobiography as a literary genre, the past 60 years have seen the dominance of self-reflexive writing and the rise of metaautobiographies, that is, autobiographies that employ metafictionality. The conjuncture of autobiography and metafiction stems from their shared inclination towards self-exploration and the implicit manipulation of the writing process. Rien ne vas plus (1991) and Θα ήθελα (2005) take this process a step further: they are metaautobiographical fictions because their character-protagonists reconstruct their biographical record through the act of writing, while their real-fictional lives are recounted in juxtaposition with the fictions that they are crafting. For these protagonists, fiction cannot simply define the self nor write the past but is bound to rewrite both. As their main characters rewrite themselves anew and thus make sense of their vertiginous selves, these two metaautobiographical novels make the reader aware of the process in which experiences are skillfully manipulated to be turned into works of art.

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