The impacts of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism on the development of autofiction

This study aims to investigate the ways in which poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism have contributed to the development of autofiction. It is contended that the genre has a dialectical relationship with the twentieth century critical theories. Autofiction both affirms and questions the poststructuralist dismantling of the traditional perspectives on the concepts of authority, authenticity and truth by bringing the authorial presence back to the text but fictionalising it to some extent, committing to narrate the truth but creating an ambivalence around it. Autofiction engages with both the possibilities and limits of language in representing the referential world. Autofiction accepts that language fails to portray the reality truthfully; however, at the same time, it holds what language creates to be still connected to the reality of the author. Autofiction’s contention of the possibility of truth depends heavily on psychoanalytic theories. It is observed that although autofiction assumes the subject to be fractured by the unconscious and denied access to the whole picture of the self’s reality, little pieces of information that are recovered through psychoanalytic processes in autofictional narration provide truthful insights into selfhood and create opportunities to conceive subjective versions of reality. Finally, the postmodernist presumption of collapse of grand narratives is argued to have paved way to autofiction’s preoccupation with subjective histories. As district from the postmodernist emphasis on irony, autofiction is considered as intending to provide a truthful representation of the referential by exploring multiple possibilities of the subject and embodied experience.