Book contents
- Contemporary Fiction in French
- Contemporary Fiction in French
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Mediterranean Francophone Writing
- Chapter 2 After the Experiment
- Chapter 3 Getting a Future
- Chapter 4 Contemporary French Fiction and the World
- Chapter 5 The Franco-American Novel
- Chapter 6 Graphic Novel Revolution(s)
- Chapter 7 ‘Back in the USSR’
- Chapter 8 Fictions of Self
- Chapter 9 Trauma, Transmission, Repression
- Chapter 10 Wretched of the Sea
- Chapter 11 Urban Dystopias
- Chapter 12 Imagining Civil War in the Contemporary French Novel
- Notes
- Select Secondary Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - Fictions of Self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2021
- Contemporary Fiction in French
- Contemporary Fiction in French
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Mediterranean Francophone Writing
- Chapter 2 After the Experiment
- Chapter 3 Getting a Future
- Chapter 4 Contemporary French Fiction and the World
- Chapter 5 The Franco-American Novel
- Chapter 6 Graphic Novel Revolution(s)
- Chapter 7 ‘Back in the USSR’
- Chapter 8 Fictions of Self
- Chapter 9 Trauma, Transmission, Repression
- Chapter 10 Wretched of the Sea
- Chapter 11 Urban Dystopias
- Chapter 12 Imagining Civil War in the Contemporary French Novel
- Notes
- Select Secondary Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Debates about the fictional nature of self-narrative and the relationship between materials of very different factual status within autobiography or memoir are far from new. This chapter explores the reach and role of fiction within contemporary life-writing in French, where practices of and controversy about autofiction have assumed a distinctive cast and particular intensity in recent years. My title, ‘fictions of self’, gestures towards an emerging consensus among practitioners and consumers of self-narrative alike that imagination and fact are not opposites; no longer, as Mary Cappello puts it in a recent study of creative non-fiction, ‘weary binaries’, but mutually supportive, differently legitimate routes to self-investigation. Indeed, it is precisely the seepage of imaginary material into life-writing in French that renders it such rich terrain, exciting the imagination of writers and readers alike.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contemporary Fiction in French , pp. 152 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021