Sources of the Self(ie): An Introduction to the Study of Autofiction in English

What is autofiction?

Saint Augustine—whose fifth-century Confessions inaugurated the autobiographical tradition—has a famous line about time: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” The same can be said of autofiction, a type of writing that is seemingly everywhere these days but remains notoriously difficult to define. In francophone scholarship, where narratology and taxonomy loom large, a robust debate about autofiction’s features and constitutive corpus has raged since the 1980s.¹ In contrast, the anglophone milieu has adopted the term belatedly and without the same interest in precisely delineating its contours. At issue for francophone critics are questions like whether the writer, narrator, and protagonist need to share the same name; whether the events recounted must be wholly, partially, or not at all “true” in the referential sense; what stylistic features are used to shape the narrative; and what themes are prevalent. Where the competing, hyper-specific viewpoints on these topics make it difficult to arrive at one coherent definition of autofiction in that context, anglophone critics are beset by the opposite problem: namely, that the variety of works unproblematically grouped under the label—works from different periods, genres, styles, and even media—necessitates a broad conceptual rubric. Alison Gibbons captures this breadth when she defines autofiction as “an explicitly hybrid form of life writing that merges autobiographical fact with fiction. The autofictional mode is not restricted to writing; it has been observed in the visual arts, cinema, theatre and online” (120). This definition also reflects the anglophone view that autofiction is more a “ ‘modus’ of writing” than a distinct genre (Ferreira-Myers 41).

The diversity of the essays in this special double issue of English Studies in Canada—which cover a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century genres and approaches—reflects this encompassing attitude. In asking writers to address the topic of “Autofiction in the Age of the Self(ie),” I aimed to gather reflections on autofiction both as an ascendant mode of production in the digital age and as a lens through which to reconsider texts from earlier periods. This double mandate is discernible in the essays ultimately selected for inclusion, some of which analyze works crafted “from the very soil of the internet,” as Alois Sieben describes Megan Boyle’s Liveblog, and others of which deal with established nineteenth- and twentieth-century genres and authors, such as the poetry of Walt Whitman and the short stories of Alice Munro. Notably, six out of the eight essays discuss books written by women, a ratio that, as I will argue in what follows, confirms the political exigency of self-fictionalizing tactics for multiple generations of women. The fact that so many of the writers who submitted to this special issue are emerging scholars moreover confirms the dynamism and relevance of autofiction as a nascent lens within the field of English studies.

Autofiction has only become a discrete topic of anglophone scholarly attention over the past decade, during which time the first conferences, journals, and monographs devoted to the subject appeared. However, scholars have been analyzing hybrid narratives that blur the line between fact and fiction since the late 1980s, when feminist critics expanded the study of autobiography—a genre that was dominated by Enlightenment views of subjectivity predominantly expressed by white European men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas De Quincey—to encompass a more diverse range of authors and texts. Because the term autofiction has now achieved general consensus as the catch-all for such practices, and because it comes laden with a rich French genealogy, anglophone scholars almost always position their discussions of this emergent topic as young branches on that storied family tree. Recent monographs like Hywel Dix’s The Late-Career Novelist: Career Construction Theory, Authors, and Autofiction (2017), Marjorie Worthington’s The Story of Me: Contemporary American Autofiction (2018), and many of the essays in the edited collection Autofiction in English (edited by Dix, 2018) open with a customary nod to...