Autofiction Is Not a Centaur: A Genre Model for Autofiction as Fiction

Abstract

The definitory debate that from its very inception autofiction sparked within the French critical landscape, later taken up by critics working in other languages, never fully caught on with English scholars. Conceptualising fiction as a mode and, above all, as a form of generic and discursive hybridity, English scholarship has so far mostly sidestepped the issue of what autofiction is in favour of the more pragmatic question of its effects. By mobilising a cognitive, storyworld and rhetorical approach to fictionality, as well as theories of autofiction in other languages, the article first exposes the hybridity argument as spurious, and then argues for a model of autofiction as a form of the novel and a genre in its own right. A definition of autofiction is proposed that, as shown via a selection of works by Jeannette Winterson, Bret Easton Ellis, Paul Auster and Sheila Heti, fully accounts for the diversity of autofiction in English. Staking out a distinct place for autofiction in the literary system – the article claims – helps to guide readers past the impasse of reversible generic attribution, but it also lays the groundwork for more nuanced debates on the specificity of each individual work within the spectrum, ultimately furthering the work of autofiction scholars in the Anglosphere.