The introduction to the special issue “Performing Selves in the 21^st Century” discusses the turbulent changes that both the theory and practice of life writing have undergone in recent decades, as well as the sociocultural and media context of contemporary autobiographical and autofictional storytelling. It also surveys the papers included in this issue, which, in their different ways, expose and analyze the strong inclination of 21^st-century self-representation acts towards self-performance and self-invention.

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.”

In recent years one has observed the rise of new forms of (self-)life-storying, not only as a means of expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the turn-of-the-21^st-century auto/biographical boom but also as a manifestation of the crisis of both the auto/biographical self and form. These new self-narratives ostensibly resist the canonical “laws” of auto/biographical writing yet eagerly embrace real events from the authors’ lives. This article discusses one of the most acclaimed examples of 21^st-century (self-)life-storying, Rachel Cusk’s “Fay” trilogy — Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018). Drawing on Cusk’s archival records, it focusses on the way Cusk’s auto/biographical authorial self becomes first fictionalized and then compartmentalized into the series’ fictional characters. By referring to Clair Bishop’s Artificial Hells (2012), this essay argues that Cusk’s trilogy should be recognized as employing the strategy of “delegated performances,” where the narrativization of the self is dependent on “outsourcing” the authorial self. This strategy is here seen as a signpost of new autofiction.

December 2024.  Robert Kusek (Ph.D, D.Litt) is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Faculty of Philology, as well as Head of Research Centre for Transnational Literary Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. His research interests include life writing genres, the contemporary novel in English, queer heritage, as well as a comparative and transnational approach to literary studies. He is the author of two monographs and several dozen articles published in books and academic journals. He was a researcher in a number of Polish and international projects – currently he is a principal investigator in the National Science Centre funded project entitled “(Un)accidental Tourists: Polish Literature and Visual Culture in South Africa in the 20th and 21st Centuries.”

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).

The study examines two autofictional narratives — The Seventh Autobiography (2000) and The Eight, or Unfinished Autobiography (2007) by the Czech writer Ota Filip (1930–2018). The texts were written in reaction to a media scandal as well as some traumatic events in the author’s private life. The study attempts to understand the different ways in which the two texts were received, both in the Czech context and when compared to the reactions to the German version, Der siebente Lebenslauf (2001). The cognitive-hermeneutic theory of autobiography and autofiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes is the basis of my analysis of textual and paratextual clues that allow reading the Autobiographies in different cognitive frames, or in the evaluation framework of “five worlds” as presented by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. An intepretation of Filip’s works within the concept of the “Inspired World” is also related to the context of Czech autofiction literature (Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Bohumil Hrabal).

December 2024: Jan Tlustý is an associate professor in the Department of Czech Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, as well as in the Department of Czech Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He serves as chief editor of the scholarly journal Bohemica Litteraria. His research focuses on interpretation and aesthetic experience, particularly from the perspectives of phenomenology, hermeneutics, cognitive science and Czech poststructuralism (studies on Jan Patočka, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Milan Jankovič, and others). He is the author of Příliš hlučná prázdnota: Mezery, otřesy a smysl literárního díla, 2022 (Too loud an emptiness: Gaps, shaking, and meaning in works of literature). His research also extends to autofiction in Czech and world literatures (studies on Bohumil Hrabal, Ota Filip, and John Maxwell Coetzee) and to the work of literary scholar Zdeněk Kožmín.

The paper examines how telling someone else’s life story, especially if this person is a close relative, sheds light on the author him- or herself or at least invites readers to wonder about the author’s relationship to the person whose life is told. The text analyzed is Jeannette Walls’s “true-life novel” Half Broke Horses, in which the author has her grandmother tell her own life in the first person. Drawing on research about narratives of vicarious experience, “fictional contamination” in life storytelling, and “narrator and disclosure functions” discussed in the context of unreliable narration, the paper unravels some of the ambivalences and conflicting (self-)images created in the text and explores the effects that such narrative choices might have on readers’ interpretations and how they create “resonance.”

December 2024. Jarmila Mildorf is Professor of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn. She has published widely on socionarratology, autobiography, oral history, medicine and literature, the medical humanities, dialogue, second-person narration, audionarratology and radio drama. Recent publications include Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity  (De Gruyter 2023) and the edited collections Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama  (Ohio State University Press 2021), Narrative and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice  (Oxford University Press 2023) and Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill 2024).

The central problem of post-secular literary criticism is conversion, understood as a turn to various forms of spirituality beyond the traditional, canonical forms of religiosity. This article examines conversion threads in narratives that combine autobiographical and phantasmal selves. The analyzed texts reveal an interplay of fictionality and referentiality that leads to fundamental life changes for the selves. The paper comments on selected works by Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Annie Ernaux, and Andrzej Stasiuk. It also indicates analogies between literary conversions and the philosophical concepts of Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk.

December 2024: Jacek Bielawa holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Silesia (Katowice). His research interests focus on the intersections of life writing, Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self and Peter Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics. His recent publications include articles on Polish autofiction in “Czas Kultury,” “Autobiografia,” and “Romanoslavica.” He is currently conducting a research project titled “Autofictional Conversions and the Central European Identity in the Works of Waldemar Bawołek, Marek Bieńczyk and Andrzej Stasiuk,” financed by the National Science Centre, Poland.

The article inquires into the place and function of autobiography in today’s “hypermnesic” (Hayles) social, medial, and cultural situation. It discusses Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, Day, Fidget, and The Ideal Lecture, which hardly anyone reads as autobiographical texts. In a self-reflective and quasi-theoretical manner Goldsmith opens the question of a “life record,” pointing at the medium of language and its performance, and at the media in a technological sense. In an attempt to theorize the way digitization changes the possibilities of subjectivizing the lived, experienced presence and human memory, this study relies on the concept of “tertiary retention” (Stiegler) and problematizes the notion of memory and “archive.” It also points at “ideality” or “utopia,” as used in Goldsmith’s The Ideal Lecture, in light of the problem of language as a memory device and the inherently temporal narrative structure we are used to give to our lives.

December 2024:  Miroslav Kotásek is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. After studying English and Czech languages and literatures, he devoted his Ph.D. thesis to the topic of self-referentiality, especially in narrative texts. Despite dealing with the topic primarily within a literary theoretical framework, this research has led him to broader questions of media borders and capabilities, the relationship between fiction and “reality,” and the domains of affect and performance. In his university courses or in his writing he struggles with these topics ever since, adding culture theory and the study of popular culture to the mix. Nowadays he is mainly concerned with the representation of Holocaust and the role of memory in general, the study of autobiography (life-writing), and the construction of the future in different discourses. He is also active as a translator of non-fiction (e.g. Frank Kermode, Hayden White, Dick Hebdige).