Course Description
Summary
The term “autofiction” originated in France in the late 1970s to describe a certain kind of knowing, renegade, and mock-heroic school of autobiographical fiction that fell somewhere between William Burroughs and Marcel Proust. It was “writing before or after literature,” meaning its pretensions were so pure as to be somehow super-literary—the ordinary terms (autobiographical fiction, bildungsroman, thinly veiled memoir, etc.) were too exhausted to apply. Right now we’re living through an explosion of autofiction, and we’ll read widely in this relatively new genre (Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Chris Kraus, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Tao Lin) while also reading important precursors from B.S. Johnson to James Baldwin and Curzio Malaparte. Students will write their own works of autofiction in various lengths and styles and refine them in regular workshops.
