FFS 380 - Adventures in Autofiction and Autotheory

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

How do personal experiences and positionings make their way into literary writing and theoretical explorations? In recent years, French-language writers have been at the forefront of an emergent, highly politicized, and deeply personal writing practice that many are calling autotheory. This new experimental mode extracts political epistemologies from the embodied experience of the writer and explores the individual implications of systemic policies and institutionalized practices. These writers inherit a long tradition of personal writing in French, and in particular, the boundary-blurring techniques associated with autofiction, a literary tendency developed largely by women writers of the 1980s and 1990s. In this course, we study both autofictional and autotheoretical texts and examine the complex relationships between life and writing, truth and fiction, theory and practice. Authors may include Marguerite Duras, Assia Djebar, Annie Ernaux, Virginie Despentes, Edouard Louis, Paul B. Preciado, Amandine Gay. Anne Brancky.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS