Literary Autobiography
Melissa Schuh’s Literary Autobiography offers a theoretically elegant and literarily sensitive rethinking of the fraught relationship between the novel and autobiography. Central to the book is the concept of performative contradiction, which Schuh develops as the defining aesthetic strategy of literary autobiography—a strategy that embraces fictionality not to undermine life writing, but to open it toward deeper questions of truth, identity, and narrative ethics. Schuh’s analyses of Roth, Coetzee, and Grass persuasively show how these works form an aesthetic lineage that contemporary autofiction continues to draw from. This book will be indispensable for scholars across life writing studies, narratology, and literary ethics.
—Stefan Kjerkegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark
Why do novelists write about themselves? What modes do novelists use to manipulate representations of their personality? Why is it often late in their career that novelists write about their own lives? This book develops the concept of literary autobiography as a genre responding to a profound uncertainty about the knowability of the self, often negotiated through a particular concern with the writing life. Comprising a particular sub-genre and style of contemporary life writing, the autobiographies examined in this book foreground their formal ‘literariness’ through the explicit use of fictionality, disrupting established (auto)biographical tropes by employing narrative innovations associated with postmodern fiction and prefigured by modernist experimentation. Taken together, they exemplify an aesthetics of performative contradiction, in which novelistic strategies cast doubt on the veracity of the life represented. Exploring works by canonical and popular novelists – J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård – this book addresses the increasing novelisation of contemporary life writing, analysing the related ethical and aesthetic implications of fictionality. More widely, it discusses the current popularity, prevalence of and public appetite for life writing, mapping out the reception and ambiguous position of literary autobiography within the literary marketplace and its adjoining bodies of criticism.
Melissa Schuh is Lecturer in English Literature at Kiel University (Germany) and deputy editor for C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings.