The world of autofiction: hyphenated identity and collective world-making in contemporary transnational novels

Thesis

The thesis uses the frameworks and theory of world literature to read the autofictional novels, short stories and films of three contemporary writers: Ruth Ozeki, Téa Obreht and Nicole Krauss. It explores how these authors use autofiction to express a sense of transnational interconnection and to reflect on their responsibilities as mixed-race, diasporic or multinational writers within global networks. In contrast to a prevailing perception of autofiction, especially by non-male writers, as solipsistic or self-absorbed, this thesis argues for texts such as Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017) and Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (2011) as indicative of a relational or intersubjective strain in the genre and as demonstrating its world-making affordances. Although each writer engages differently with the ever-changing parameters of autofiction, a consistent and shared interest in connectivity and collaborative meaning-making is evident across their work. In their autofictional novels, literary practices such as reading and writing emerge as sites of resistance to the self- and community-effacing violence of historical conflict, environmental disaster and globalisation. As a result, this thesis argues that these writers are not only expanding the possibilities of autofiction, but also using their interpersonal interpretations of it to evoke forms of literary worlding predicated on the collation of intra- and extra-textual community. It connects Krauss’s, Obreht’s and Ozeki’s representations of a collectively narrated authorial self to a reframing of ‘world’ as similarly available for collaborative reinvention with each act of textualization and, in turn, proposes a reassessment of the term ‘world literature.’ By thus reading these writers’ hyphenated American literature as world literature and defining the latter as world-making literature, it intervenes in definitional debates in world literature and further destabilises the dominant American perspective in the field, wherein ‘world literature’ often refers to texts that originate beyond US borders.

Authors: Swift, M

• Alternative title: The world of autofiction
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gax6vbv99
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: autofiction; contemporary novel; transnational authorship; world literature; American literature
• Subjects: World Literature; Contemporary Literature; Autofiction