Autofiction: Narrating the Sensitive
About this book
Challenging the view of autofiction as a hybrid of autobiography and the novel, this book redefines it as a mode of representing sensitive experience. The sensitive refers to ethically and emotionally charged personal experience — often difficult to articulate or represent — that becomes the object of narrative in autofiction, requiring new aesthetic forms and generating vulnerability, empathy, and ethical engagement between writer and reader. Through a comparative analysis of Russophone and French autofiction — particularly the works of Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, Oksana Vasyakina, Maria Stepanova, and others — this book explores how this narrative practice fosters a new ethics of writing grounded in empathy, affect, and the search for authenticity. Situated at the intersection of narratology, trauma theory, media theory, and cultural criticism, this study proposes to view autofiction not as a genre, but as a narrative practice of sensitive experience—one that shapes new forms of subjectivity in the context of political instability, digitalization, and the expanding modes of self-representation. This study will interest scholars of literature, memory and trauma studies, gender and media research, and anyone engaged with the evolution of life-writing in the twenty-first century.
Author / Editor information
Larissa Muraveva, Grenoble Alpes University, Grenoble, France.
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Dedication
V -
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Acknowledgments
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Contents
XI -
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Introduction
1 - Part I: Between Experience and Writing
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Introductory Remarks
21 -
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1 Fiction as Framing of Experience
25 -
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2 The Turn to Authenticity
41 -
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3 Autofiction, Crisis, and Narrative Identity
51 - Part II: Territories of the Sensitive
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Introductory Remarks
69 -
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4 The Narrator as a Vulnerable Subject
79 -
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5 Autofiction in the Hope of Empathy
96 -
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6 Is Autofiction a Transgressive Genre?
109 - Part III: The Narrativization of Trauma in Autofiction
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Introductory Remarks
123 -
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7 Ways of Representing Trauma in Autofiction
129 -
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8 Autofiction between Therapy and Performativity
153 -
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9 Autofiction on Violence: The Ethics of Storytelling and the Symbolic Role of Language
163 -
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10 Cultural Trauma(s) in Russian-Language Autofiction
179 - Part IV: Nostalgia for Immediacy
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Introductory Remarks
195 -
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11 Autofiction and Photography: The “Ghost Image” from the First-Person Narrative
205 -
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12 Autofiction and New Media: In Search of Immediacy Lost
234 -
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13 Conclusion
245 -
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Works Cited
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Index
265
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