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This essay analyses the intersection of the novel and neoliberalism as a relation of friction (Tsing). Whereas former studies of literature and neoliberalism imply models of resistance or complicity, the model of friction allows us to read novels as exploring possibilities of life and creativity within the worlds of neoliberal reification. We apply this model to contemporary autofiction: Kamers antikamers by Niña Weijers and How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. Differing from idealist accounts of neoliberalism and a capitalist view of the subject as ‘entrepreneur of the self’, we engage a materialist approach that looks at the subject as a ‘gamer’ (Wark) whose affective and cognitive skills get reified into information. We conclude that both novels foreground the desire to find possibilities of life in affective attachments, which in their turn open up possibilities of difference and creativity in the context of neoliberal abstraction and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the autofictional works of Latin American writer Mario Vargas Llosa and Tamil writer Charu Nivedita employ similar strategies. This article provides the opportunity for readers to discuss how autobiography, autofiction, and life writing might evolve in the future. In addition, it seeks to discover the theoretical implications in the life narratives of the chosen writers' works. This article investigates the ongoing evolution of life-writing studies and their potential impact on a wide range of fields of study. These two authors share numerous similarities, most notably a meta-modernist storytelling style. Through autofiction, they question the nature of reality and construct an alternate universe. To create a narrative, one must demonstrate empathy and connection, as well as address the interrelationships between different ways of thinking and being. This article attempts to provide an overview of autofiction and examines how Mario Vargas Llosa and Charu Nivedita use it in their novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on three texts that blur the boundaries of form—I Love Dick (1997) by Chris Kraus, Simple Passion (1991) by Annie Ernaux and Suite vénitienne (1983) by Sophie Calle. They can be read as autofiction in both their construction and autobiographical basis. The texts come together through their singular focus on a male other, who on each occasion is a subject without a voice. The article charts the development of the term autofiction to situate the texts, then through close readings draws out how they use the form to universalise the personal and to demonstrate a constructed 'I' through writing. The article focuses on the way the texts offer a reconfigured autobiographical relationality between women and men, and in this a disruptive excess. The article proposes that the characteristics of 'autofiction' support these achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the reuse of the theoretical framework provided by Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation, this essay analyses the functionality of fiction in Gabriela Wiener's first novel, Huaco Retrato. This study praises the connecting thread that directly links the past with the subplots of the present and, supported by the postulates of Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, exemplifies that the abuses derived from colonization to indigenous minorities remain in force and the protagonist's desire to decolonize herself by rebelling against the canons of the Eurocentric society.

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Copyright of Estudios de Teoría Literaria is the property of Estudios de Teoria Literaria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides an innovative perspective on John Updike’s visit to Eastern Europe in the 1960s, including Bulgaria, as reflected in his short story “The Bulgarian Poetess” first published in The New Yorker on March 13, 1965. The inspiration for this interpretation is as much academic as it is anthropological. It comes from Updike’s use of my own surname, Glavanakova, which is not a common Slavic one, for the fictional character of the real-life Bulgarian poetess he met, whom researchers have established to be Blaga Dimitrova. Many have delved into the text aiming at a detailed and, more significantly, an authentic reconstruction of events, places and people appearing in the story (Katsarova 2010; Kosturkov 2012; Briggs and Dojčinović 2015). A main preoccupation of these analyses has been to establish the degree of factual distortion in Updike’s representation of the people and places behind the Iron Curtain. The pervasive imagery of the mirror, implying both its reflecting and doubling function, and the repetitive use of cognates associated with truth and honesty in the story suggest the focus of this article, which falls on the dynamics between authenticity and artifice from the perspective of autofiction by way of illustrating how one culture translates into another “at the opposite side[s] of the world” (Updike, “The Bulgarian Poetess”). In my interpretation, autofiction opens ample spaces for representations and discussions of identity and self-/reflexivity in a transcultural context.

Do readers agree on the literary character of a text? To answer this question, we have studied the reception of six recent works of Latin American autofiction on Goodreads by assessing reader reviews. To quantify our findings, we have assigned each review an "index of literariness." Our results suggest that autofiction, as a reading strategy, is uncommon: the most intermediate mean values (the most statistically "autofictional" position) present the highest standard deviation, demonstrating that many reviewers choose between a fundamentally factual reading or a fundamentally literary reading of autofictional texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work seeks to contribute to the production of knowledge about acting in the context of contemporary independent theater in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán-Argentina. We try to recognize the ways in which the territorialities of the actors' and actresses' bodies participate in the specific configuration of an artistic work. For this purpose, we analyze the theatrical production Manifiesto por amor a los hombres, an autofictional show premiered on November 23, 2012, which addresses the issue of male homosexuality. A work developed through scenic improvisations, where the fictional construction of the play compromises the personal biography of the protagonist. This creative modality that favors the crossing between art and life in the figure of the performer enables disruptive corporal and acting experiences against theatrical forms sustained in the mimetic-scenic illusion, at the same time that promotes practices of micropolitical resistance in a social context that is not very favorable to sexual diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her autofictional writings, Marta Sanz exhibits herself tattooing her own middle-aged, diseased body before the public gaze. Her body could be any woman’s body: it becomes a privileged locus from which to examine a sense of vulnerability that exceeds the author herself. Sanz’s work serves as an entry point to the study of an emerging mode of socially committed autofiction produced by a transgenerational group of contemporary feminist authors, including Paula Bonet, Layla Martínez and Sara Torres. I turn to the works of Jacques Rancière and Sara Ahmed to examine how the aesthetics of these texts might affect the reader, thereby shedding light on the political – the relations to be established between what is seen and what is imaginable; what is done and what can be done –. The life writings recently published by Bonet, Martínez, Sanz and Torres, I sustain, signal the passage from a centripetal and patriarchal model of autofiction, where the author monologues with himself, to a centrifugal model, where the author reaches out to her audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political productivity of autofiction as a narrative strategy linked to feminist and LGTBI activism in María Moreno’s novels Black Out and The Skeffington Affair. Configured as a hybrid text combining fiction, memoir, and essay, Black Out revolves around Moreno’s dissident authorial figure: an alcoholic queer woman who challenges the limits of the sober, heteronormative bourgeois subject. Since what Black Out presents – similarly as The Skeffington Affair as apocryphal (auto)biography – is not so much the writing of an ego or a super-ego but the writing of desire, of the alcoholic drive that is shared with others – a «writing of the id» – my analysis moves away from categories such as autobiography or ego-literature, and studies Moreno’s narrative as a form of autofiction that pursues a queer nomadic ethics (Butler 1993; Braidotti 2009) in its turn toward heterography (Forest 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the place that Cristina Fernández Cubas occupies in the Spanish artistic field. Through the character of the writer, it focuses on the tensions between female writing and literary institution that several of her stories stage. To this end, I rely on the concept of «paratopy» («paratopie»), developed by Dominique Maingueneau (2004), which alludes the author’s paradoxical place respect to social space, positioned simultaneously inside and outside of it. The variety of paratopic representations reveals an evolution in the authorship of Fernández Cubas: from her earliest fantastic stories, where the protagonists manifest the «anxiety of creation» (Planté 2019, 137), to the latest ones, where the non-realistic is combined with the autofictional, and the authorization of the writer – legitimized by the literary institution – is inversely proportional to her visibility as a female subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According Maingueneau (2004; 2017), writers exist within the literary discourse, which invariably occupies a paratopic space. Despite being part of society, they occupy a special status that sets them apart from the rest of the elements of the social space. This distinctiveness is especially connoted in the case of women writers, principally in the theatre due to the immediacy of the scene. The primary objective of this paper is to analyze how female playwrights, such as Marina Otero in Love Me (2022) and Bibiana Monje in Lacura (2017), portray themselves in autofictional drama plays, with fully aware of their paratopic position. They not only include episodes of their lives in the diegesis, but also, they use this opportunity to articulate critical discourses against different social problems, such as misogyny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article proposes an approach to the dramatic work of Diana M. de Paco Serrano (Murcia, 1973) from an autofictional perspective. In any case, it is about giving theoretical operability to a performative conception of the «autofictional game» in the midst of that complex network of relationships, confluences and dissonances between the real person, the idea of the playwright and the constitution of the dramatic characters. To this end, specific questions will be addressed regarding the theoretical particularities of dramatic autofiction, broadly outlining the author’s dramaturgical project, in order to forge a kind of guide for her production, while, by delimiting a specific corpus in three fundamental instances, intertextual comparative nuances can be established that offer a kind of preponderant features that could well define his autofictional poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019) complicates Mikhail Bakhtin’s dichotomy between monologism and polyphony through strategies resonating with Cristina Rivera Garza’s concept of disappropriation. In contrast to Bakhtinian polyphony, Lerner’s novel posits the necessity of exposing the author’s agency behind the characters’ voices to refrain from appropriating them; it thus embraces authorial fallibility and turns it into an ethical project. Despite comprising multiple narrators, The Topeka School is metafictionally presented as authored by an older version of its teenage protagonist Adam Gordon, serving as Lerner’s alter ego. Adam’s overarching authorial presence is suggested by the narrative’s frequent rejection of individuation and mimesis in its depiction of different characters’ speeches; yet, by presenting individual voices as interwoven, the novel also emphasises the collective nature of language. I discuss how this tension between authorial control and interconnectedness is reflected in textual interferences across different narrative perspectives, in the oscillation between authorial and figural narration in the interludes dedicated to the character Darren, and in the infiltration of various intra and intertextual references into Amber’s as well as Adam’s voice. Through these disappropriative techniques, Lerner’s novel avoids solipsism while also moving beyond the dialogic strategies of previous post-postmodern metafiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s. Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth- and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history. And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality, “even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals” (133). This article expands the chronology and geography of narratological analysis of this genre through reading Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography. This reading brings into consideration new forms, affects, and narrative structures as constituent elements of trans narratives and has the potential to expand anglophone trans imaginaries past the confines of their current locations and temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Orbis Tertius is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Focusing on a little-known autobiographical novel about the French translation of Vladimir Nabokov's multilingual magnum opus, Ada or Ardor (1969), this paper discusses the use of autofiction as a generically unstable form of life writing to examine contemporary questions of identity, authenticity, and authorship raised by the practice of literary translation at the turn of the twenty-first century in France. Through a reading of the novel as partial biography of translator Gilles Chahine, this article argues that the autobiographical mode in Deux étés allows the author, Erik Orsenna, to witness, through a collective 'we' that looks forward to the narrative voice in Annie Ernaux' Les Années (2008), the combined economic forces of post-colonial literature and the internet change the way French readers approach English texts. While examining a form of life writing rooted in France's 1970s avant-garde (Gasparini 191), autofiction is an opportunity to read Nabokov's own literalist approach to translation in the light of the issues of identity and authorship raised by self-reflexive fiction, notably by drawing a portrait of the translator as writer in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the connection between Italian and Colombian cinema through the novels and films of Colombian author and filmmaker Fernando Vallejo (1942–present). It examines Vallejo's autofictional novel, Los caminos a Roma (The Roads to Rome) (1988) where he recounts his experience as a student at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1966, criticizes Italian neorealism and auteurism, and articulates his embryonic idea to create a film set during Colombia's civil war. In his critique of Italian cinema, I argue that Vallejo embodies a certain hostility towards European film, its institutions and especially Italian neorealism that was percolating in the Latin America of the 1960s and 1970s. Exploring the historiography of Italy's relationship with Latin American cinema, I remark on an emergent (and problematic) privileging of Italian neorealism as a prototype for New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) and consider how Vallejo's filmmaking was shaped in opposition to Italian archetypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Il presente articolo investiga la tendenza a rappresentare la disabilità come una condizione totalizzante che non lascia spazio ad altre caratteristiche dell’individuo. Nel fare ciò, il saggio analizza alcuni topoi della costruzione narrativa della disabilità: l’accostamento ad una seconda vita, la visione della disabilità come accusa o colpa, e la sua percezione come una forma di mancanza. Tale approccio fa risaltare la capacità mitopoietica alla base di un notevole corpus di produzioni narrative nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo. Al centro del discorso si trovano, fra gli altri, autori come Alessandro Perissinotto e Piero d’Ettorre, Michela Murgia, Carmen Verde, e Simona Vinci, scrittori che l’articolo propone come riferimenti contemporanei al tema della disabilità e che ricevono il testimone da autori più canonicamente studiati come Dacia Maraini e Giuseppe Pontiggia.

Scuola di nudo (1994) è uno dei romanzi più significativi degli anni Novanta, sia perché segna l’esordio romanzesco di uno scrittore lucido e impietoso come Walter Siti, aprendo la strada ad un genere, quello autofinzionale, in Italia non ancora praticato, sia perché è un’opera in grado di cogliere e rappresentare il particolare momento storico in cui viene scritto. Questo articolo si propone di interpretare Scuola di nudo come romanzo di una doppia mutazione: quella personale che segna per Walter Siti il passaggio dalla scrittura in versi a quella in prosa; e quella collettiva (antropologica) che investe la società italiana tra la fine degli anni Ottanta e gli anni Novanta, e che si accompagna a un radicale cambiamento di postura dell’intellettuale verso la realtà, pienamente incarnato dal protagonista del romanzo.

This article analyses the two feature-length films by Signe Baumane, Rocks in My Pockets (2014) and My Love Affair with Marriage (2022). For this purpose, this article discusses theories of autofiction and its representation in different forms and media and pays particular attention to the potential of animation to represent fictionalized selves. Drawing on genre and gender theories, as well as the study of memory and self, this article shows how Baumane dissects the constructedness of female and feminine selves and criticizes the oppressive nature of the individual and collective discourses around mental health and womanhood.

This article examines the presentation of a personal photographic archive via the temporal and virtual space of social media through Our Days of Gold, an ongoing durational artwork constituted of a cluster of three interconnected Instagram accounts: @ourdaysofgold_film, @ourdaysofgold_digital and @ourdaysofgold. The project interweaves two separate temporalities: the social media accounts started in April 2017 to mark the first anniversary of my mother Cécile Barbiaux’s sudden death, drawing on an archive of analogue and digital photography recording an image-making collaboration that took place between 2002 and 2007. Staging a group of family and friends, the images oscillate between everyday activities and improvised performances within the confines of a familial territory of old farmhouses, orange groves and gardens in Sorrento, Italy. While the accounts are anonymous, the images, shared daily, are accompanied by captions that centre Cécile, even when she is not in the frame. Cécile is staged as the mysterious and alluring protagonist of her own unfolding story. Through its activation of Instagram’s languages, communities, specific structure and affordances, Our Days of Gold, or ODOG, creates a virtual space for a temporal paradox, where the past becomes contemporary by being stretched to excruciating slowness over the duration of the present, with one summer afternoon taking over nine months to share at the glacial pace of an image a day. Over its long duration, ODOG has become a palimpsest overwritten with followers’ contributions and interpretations. Through the anonymity and reticence that accompany the sharing of an intimate personal archive, ODOG provides a space for conversations and interactions, but also for silent, private accumulation of memories, familiarity and attachment.

The article examines the presence of dolls in the work of writer Teresa Ciabatti and isolates four narrative functions carried out by dolls. First, the protagonists' identification with broken dolls encourages the acceptance of one's imperfection and promotes the definition of identity as constitutively incomplete (Il mio paradiso è deserto, 2013). Second, Ciabatti entrusts dolls with the task of protecting the characters' most profound and fragile selves (La più amata, 2017). Third, by enabling the re-staging of motherhood and trauma in a safe space, dolls challenge a certain monolithic conception of maternity, youth, and beauty (Sembrava bellezza, 2021). Finally, dolls stand as markers for autofiction, for they both share a disturbing proximity to reality that confuses the boundaries between good and evil, real and fiction. In conclusion, the article argues that Ciabatti's use of dolls produces a theoretical move towards the formation of a multifaceted, open, and mobile definition of womanhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I respond to Australian author Charmian Clift's question about writing: 'what are you doing it for?' (Wheatley 2022, 291). This question is the title of one of Clift's essays, from a collection of narrative-driven essays, written for the Women's Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, after Clift's return to Australia in 1964. I consider the similarities between realist fiction and writing that (by classification) purports to bear a closer allegiance to the author's autobiographical life. I understand realist writing to be a representation of living | memory – the complicated and multi-faceted nature of our interior selfhood. This essay reflects my preoccupation with the cartwheels of our inner consciousness as it relates to what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write, and how we engage with the work of others, both writers we know in the everyday, and writers we 'know' through the page. I consider the act of producing narrative as a sensate response to enigma, a creative response to rumination and (perhaps) an antidote to ongoing rumination – shirking the discussion about autobiography in favour of a discussion about impetus – considering writing as a reflection upon the operations (and inherent conundrums) of an interior consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book Todo cambió (Everything Changed) by Josías López Gómez engages in the construction of self through autobiographical memory. This notion can refer to the "life experience" of each subject in an experimental investigation; in literature, I conceive it as part of an "aesthetic experience" of the narrative subject's configuration across time. In López Gómez's literary works, I analyze autobiographical memory, on the one hand, through narratological elements that permit me to see the movement of the discursive self in textual time and space; on the other hand, it is necessary to complement the research with information from the work's creative context and interviews with the author. The analysis shows how connects his own experience with some of his characters to construct a new narrative subject in light of a fictional subject conceived in and questioning from modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study specifies three forms of autobiographical writing: the prose of Jana Bodnárová's takmer neviditeľná (almost invisible, 2008), whose title (beginning with a lowercase letter) suggests the dissolution of the subject in fragments from her past and present life; the hybrid "novel" of Katarína Kucbelová Čepiec (2019; forthcoming in Eng. trans. The Bonnet, 2024), in which the autobiographical line is one of its many layers; and Michaela Rosová's novella Tvoja izba (Your room, 2019), both revealing and concealing hidden layers of the self. Through the texts in question and secondary literature, the article documents not only the revitalization of autobiographical approaches in Slovak women's writing after 2000, but also the reinforcement of its fictionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Czech author Ota Filip's autofictional texts Sedmý životopis (The seventh autobiography, 2000) and Osmý čili nedokončený životopis (The eighth or unfinished autobiography, 2007) in the intersection of several contexts. Based on archival research of Filip's estate, it reconstructs their complex genesis and examines the factors that influenced their final edition, as well as the differences between the Czech and German versions of Sedmý životopis. The study analyzes the narrative as well as broader textual and paratextual strategies that create the hybrid status of the two "autobiographies" and provide the reader with contradictory instructions: to read the texts as autobiography and/or as fiction. This tension is also investigated with regard to the reception of Filip's texts. The study further exposes some of Filip's mystifications and reveals how he uses the porous boundary between fact and fiction to come to terms with his traumas and media scandals, and to create a socially acceptable image of himself. Both autobiographies are also placed in the broader context of Filip's literary works and contemporary Czech literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sergio Blanco's play Tebas Land (2012) is an exploration of his concept of autoficción [self- or autofiction] in which Blanco shows how creative acts like writing and performance reflect the ways that truth and fiction coexist in our understanding of self and other, and in which identities and staged realities are relational rather than binary. The stage functions in Blanco's work not as a place to arrive at the real reason or motivation for an event or its consequences, or amplify the context for unexplored histories to enter into the dialogue, but rather as a place where truth is always already fiction. Blanco sets up vectors where fact and fiction are constantly made, undone, and remade. Tebas Land features Oedipus' infamous patricide as its point of departure, and Blanco uses this story to explore familial murder and the ethics of reconstructing it on stage, as well as the feasibility of re-presenting any "real" or performed act as authentic. Blanco toys with frameworks like theatre of the real, nested space and time, the act of watching and being watched, and objects that shift meaning and thereby defy documentary impulses to fix significance to context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a consideration of the function of metaphor and the recently-popularized hybrid narrative modes, this paper delves into the theme of consent in relation to female-authored fictional texts written in the wake of the #MeToo movement, focusing on Kristen Roupenian's short story "Cat Person" as a case study. Central to the critical reception of Roupenian's story are many discourses, whose authors conflate Roupenian with the female-identified character in her story, that disregard the story as fiction despite its genre classification. I explore how the acknowledgement of author as artist and the politics of consent are necessary for readerships who don't want to further oppress female-identified authorial voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutiful Reader, or, a Part-Playful, Part-Earnest Experimental Autofiction on the Fascinating and Inexhaustible Subject of How Reading is Variously Learned, Conceptualized and Practiced, which Takes Account of Socio-Political Forces and Historical Change and Whose Mode of Narration is Meandering and Discontinuous, Juxtaposing, neither Arbitrarily nor with Adherence to a Predetermined or Obvious Logic, Autobiographical Fragments, Personal Observations and Reflections, as Well as Extensive Citations Drawn from Diverse Genres and Contexts, to Create a Potentially Unendingly Expanding and Reshaping Narrative-Assemblage Designed to Be Evasive of Prediction and to Generate Increasingly Complex Feedback Loops between the Writerly Text and the Reader, Who Will Encounter during the Course of Her/His/Their Wondrous, Experiential and Transformational Adventure, Inter Alia and in No Particular Sequence, a Child Reading Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Alone in Bed on a Night His Mother Has Gone Out, Twelve Members of a Jury Reading an Obscene Book Pre-trial in a Room at the Old Bailey, Malcolm X Teaching Himself to Read in Prison by Diligently Copying out the Pages of a Dictionary, Anthropologists, Police Officers and Laypeople Reading Human and Nonhuman Bodies Sometimes with Deadly Consequences, the Second Reading of a Bill in the U.K. House of Commons to Tackle Illiteracy by Introducing a Phonetic Teaching Alphabet, Harlem Renaissance Author Nella Larsen Inspecting the Hands of Children Readers in the Lower East Side Library Where She Worked, and Primary School Teachers Reading Evidence of Terrorism in Poor Spelling, and All of Which Concludes with the Startling Revelation of Why the Cat in the Hat wears White Gloves, Dutiful Reader Having Finally Executed His Duty and Reached the End of the Book.

Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman has created what is surely the most ambitious film diary in the history of cinema, Babel, a twenty-four-hour film divided into nine parts and several appendices, which traces a sort of sublimated filmic duplicate of the author's life between 1983 and 2020. In Babel, Lehman painstakingly records the daily activities of his life: eating breakfast, walking, talking with friends, traveling, playing the piano, being evicted, looking for a job or paying his taxes. Despite the appearance of a realistic duplicate, the filmmaker claims for his film the denomination of "autobiographical fiction". How can we understand this mismatch between the everyday reality suggested by the film and the fictional will that the author proposes as a key to reading it? This article proposes to consider this fictional quality of Lehman's autobiographical project in the light of the aesthetic proposal crystallized in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, which Gérard Genette proposed to call "autofiction".

The article examines identity politics in contemporary literature (Olivia Wenzel, Anke Stelling). The novels are caught between politics and aesthetics, which is reflected in their controversial reception: The texts are sometimes accused of neglecting aesthetic ambivalences and instead of conveying only one-dimensional, politically correct messages. However, the accusation of being free of contradictions falls short of the mark. Both texts attempt to mediate between singular and collective identity, but they also point out the difficulties of a race-, class-, or gender-specific solidarization. Questions of point of view come to the fore, but are also problematized. For this purpose, the genre of autofiction proves to be predestined, because the texts oscillate not only between political primary reference and aesthetic self-reference, but also between narrator ego and author ego. The texts offer the reader the choice of reading them as fiction or as autobiography; both readings are possible. The result is an exciting interplay of ambivalences and the critique of ambivalences.

Los Remedios, 2021 MAX prize winner for Best New Author, embarks on a journey through personal memories, making use of autofiction in a comic key, not without moments of profound sensitivity. This article analyses the sociological foundations justifying such necessity for self-knowledge—widely extended in contemporary playwriting—as well as the philosophical and literary references of which the author makes use. Likewise, it determines the structures forming his identity genesis, such as family, neighbourhood or school, and how he establishes the art of theatre, together with friendship, as his anchorage to the complex world around him.