The Autofictional Effe, Alexandra; Lawlor, Hannie
2022, 2022-01-03
eBook
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This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from ...the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of “the autofictional” as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on “Approaches,” “Affordances,” and “Forms,” the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.
Pseudo-Memoirs  redefines the notion of fiction itself, a form that has all too often been understood in terms of its capacity to produce a seeming reality. Rochelle Tobias argues that the ...verisimilitude of the novel derives not from its object but from the subjectivity at its base. What generates the plausibility of fiction is not the referentiality of its depictions but the intentionality of consciousness. Edmund Husserl developed the idea that consciousness is always intentional in the sense that it is directed outside itself toward something that it does not find so much as it constitutes as an object. Pseudo-memoirs reveal the full implications of this position in their double structure as the tale of their own telling or the fiction of life-writing. In so doing they reveal how the world of fiction is constructed, but more important they bring to the fore the idealist premises that fuel the novel and guarantee its truth, even when it remains an invention of the imagination. Rochelle Tobias explores novels by Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and W. G. Sebald in conjunction with philosophical and theoretical texts by René Descartes, Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche, György Łukács, Roland Barthes, and Maurice Blanchot.  
Fictionality and Autofiction Srikanth, Siddharth
Style (University Park, PA),
09/2019, Letnik:
53, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The generic status of autofiction is the subject of an ongoing debate in literary studies. While scholars of autofiction typically define the genre as marked by an uncertainty over truth-telling in ...nonfictional forms such as the memoir or autobiography, this essay examines two autofictions that attempt to accurately represent the self by using both fictive and nonfictive discourse extensively. Autofiction is best conceptualized as a genre that deliberately troubles audience expectations regarding fiction and nonfiction for both autobiographical and novelistic ends. Autofictions often signal their generic status by subverting audience expectations through contradictions between paratextual material and the narrative itself. Such narratives, through generic experimentation, foreground the conventions and limits of generic fictions and nonfictions. Autofiction does not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, or fictive discourse and nonfictive discourse. Instead, writers of autofiction often deploy extensive fictionality in order to better illuminate actual life experiences.
"We all know Jean Rhys. But now, out from under the shadow of her more famous contemporary, comes Eliot Bliss. Bliss: an early twentieth century, white creole, Jamaican, lesbian writer. Bliss: whose ...out-of-print 1931 novel Saraband Calderaro first stumbles across in a bookshop in New York in 1998. Bliss: the absent figure Calderaro pursues throughout this book. The scholar Michela Calderaro reads into the past to recover Bliss, a writer she reveals as ahead of her time and not fit for her time or place in the world. Calderaro delivers Bliss back to the present, through interviews conducted across many years with Bliss's lifelong partner Patricia Allan-Burns, through the recollections of editors and friends painstakingly tracked down, through letters and diaries discovered and meticulously pored over and pieced together. Calderaro's book is, like Bliss's own novels as we come to learn, genre-defying. One part biography, one part criticism, one part memoir, one part detective story, Sheer Bliss carries us on the 'treasure hunt' Calderaro enacted over twenty years of research and personal devotion to solving a literary puzzle: Who exactly was Eliot Bliss and why were she and her work forgotten? Calderaro answers in luminous prose and what amounts to the most suspenseful excavation of a writer's life and lost-then-recovered legacies I've yet encountered." —Shara McCallum, Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State University
"On a Clear April Morning, by Marcos Iolovitch, is a lyrical and riveting coming of age story set among early twentieth-century settlers brought to an almost unknown Jewish farming experiment in an ...isolated corner of Brazil. This autobiographical novel is filled with drama, joy, disasters, romance, and humor. It travels from farms where the crops won't grow to towns where the Yiddish-speaking protagonist falls in love, befriends sons of German immigrants, studies philosophy with the Jesuits, and becomes an important member of Brazil's literary world. This first English edition includes elucidating historical notes on the origin of Jewish farming communities in the U.S., Canada and South America by the translator, Merrie Blocker, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer"--.
Eleanor Dark's novel "Pilgrimage" has never been published. She began writing it in January 1921, a year before her marriage, and finished it in the late 1920s, when she and Eric Dark were ...establishing their home in Katoomba. In the early 1930s, Eleanor tried to get "Pilgrimage" published, sending it to her literary agent in London, and showing it to P.R. Stephensen, who had published her novel 'Prelude to Christopher' in Sydney in 1934 (Brooks with Clark 122). "Pilgrimage" was not accepted for publication, and Eleanor appears to have abandoned any attempt at this.
Between 1935 and 1936, the play Lady Precious Stream was a big success as being performed and running for 1,000 nights at the Little Theatre in London. Its writer-director, Shih-I Hsiung (熊式一), was ...the first Chinese person to direct a West End play. Hsiung’s wife, Dymia, was also remarkable as the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish a fictional autobiography in English. By retrieving the lost histories of these two celebrated writers, this book considers how ideas of China and Chineseness are circulated and contested globally. Though fêted as ‘The Happy Hsiungs’, their lives ultimately highlight a bitter struggle in attempts to become modern.
Past never ends; it reoccurs through the influence of memory, reminiscences and life review. Literature often presents the endlessness of past through various literary devices like memoir, flashback, ...reminiscence, etc. There are various discussions on the importance of past. Theories of Plato, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Butler are examples for this. This paper analyses the role of the past in determining the present and future through the memories and recollections of the protagonist in the semi-autobiographical novel Roots (1966) written by Malayatoor Ramakrishnan, a renowned writer in Malayalam. Keywords: Malayattoor Ramakrishnan, Roots, Reminiscence, Past, Life Review
