Date Published:

Abstract:

In the new millennium, new media have made conscious self-performance an everyday and continuous activity. Memory has always been creative, but in the digital age it is becoming more commonplace to actively shape pictorial and verbal stories of oneself according to what one wishes to remember and show to the world. Many autofictional books explore the boundary and the overlap between memory, self-presentation, and self-invention, often through protagonists whose acts of writing appear to affect the lives they lead. This article argues that a new autofictional form turns the fluidity, mutability, and collaborative nature of self-presentation into a structural principle. It shows how Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010/2012), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) critically explore the potentials and dangers of new media ecologies, suggesting that self and world can be changed through acts of (self-)presentation. The article also addresses the question of how autofictional destabilizations of reality relate to concepts such as “alternative facts” and proclamations of a “post-factual” age, and reflects on political and ethical implications of how autofictional texts challenge the belief in uniform and universal truth.

December 2024: Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, where she is part of the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative “Literature, Cognition, and Emotions,” and teaches Anglophone and comparative literature. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published articles and book chapters on narrative and cognitive theory, twenty-first-century literature, postcolonial literature, and testimonial writing. As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.”