Fact and fiction in life stories : life writing and its narrative strategies
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
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| Description | The aim of this talk is to present my research project on life stories and contemporary life writing. I will briefly introduce the concept of identity as a life story that is largely defined by culture and the notion of autobiographical writing as an act of identity construction before moving on to life writing that combines factual and fictional narration. I will outline some of the numerous uses of the concept of autofiction and discuss the mode of fictional meta-autobiography. Drawing on recent fictionality conceptions proposed by rhetorical narratologists, instead of using the extratextual reality as a yardstick, I focus on how texts signal intentional fictionality. The last part of the presentation will concentrate on point of view in autobiographical writing, primarily on the traditional narratological distinction between the narrating I and the experiencing (or narrated) I. I will propose a tentative typology of the relationships between the narrator/teller position and the protagonist/experiencer position in autobiographical texts. |