Date Published:

Abstract:

This article discusses the changing understanding and practice of autofiction in the broader cultural context of the transformations of lived reality, the media landscape, and ways of writing and reading life stories. Originally defined as an autobiographical narrative breaking the conventions of classical autobiography, autofiction and its meaning change as notions of autobiography and the autobiographical loosen. The article suggests that a signaled autofictional intent and deliberate ambiguity of framing are important markers of contemporary autofiction. The second part of the article analyzes the strategies of such signaling in Czech writer Jan Němec’s Ways of Writing about Love (2019). It demonstrates how this work underlines the performative nature of self-representation by commenting on the process of self-narration and self-invention as well as by enacting a patchwork identity through inserting other texts and playful touches into the narrative. By allowing new media to influence the form of the book and by transcending the boundaries of the text to continue his self-performance in other media, Němec probes the possibilities not just of “writing about love” but also of performing the self. The work thus exemplifies autofiction’s tendency to respond to sociocultural developments, including changing patterns of life storytelling.

December 2024: Zuzana Fonioková is Assistant Professor in the Department of Czech Literature, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Her research interests include narrative theory, life writing, autofiction, and autobiographical comics. She is author of Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration (2015) and Od autobiografie k autofikci: Narativní strategie vyprávění o vlastním životě (From autobiography to autofiction: Narrative strategies of life narratives, 2024). She is co-editor of Narrative Inquiry special issue “Life Storytelling across Media and Contexts” (2025).