Strategies of Life Writing and Autofiction in Contemporary Novel: Reading Édouard Levé, Rachel Cusk, and Ayşegül Savaş
Özet
This book considers the path of life writing and autofiction, demonstrating how the work of Édouard Levé, Rachel Cusk, and Ayşegül Savaş radically recalibrate self-representation in the postmodern period. It follows how Levé’s Autoportrait and Suicide break with confessional and linear models of autobiography and offer a limit-case formulation of the fragmented self as an inventory. Using a minimalist “anti-narrative” that turns identity into discrete data points, they also contest the so-called “autobiographical pact” and prefigure the data-driven identities of the digital era, including that of authors themselves. Conversely, Cusk’s Outline trilogy builds selfhood on the basis of relationality, as the protagonist Faye avoids direct self-revelation, instead sketching the self through listening and being refracted in the stories of others. Her dialogism opposes demands for performative individuality and emphasizes the instability of memory, truth, and belonging. Savaş, in Walking on the Ceiling and White on White, proposes a poetics of withdrawal that approaches autofiction as a practice for veiling rather than confessing, forging a self that is intimate yet intentionally unknowable, affirming the dignity of withholding in an era of hyper-transparency.
Collectively, these writers shun the idea of a coherent, legible self, welcoming fragmentation, discontinuity, and non-linearity as more effective modes of representation for late-modern subjectivity. Their autofictional endeavors blur the line between fact and fiction, pushing readers beyond typical (auto)biographical expectations to question the idea of authentic selfhood in a mediated world. The book contends that life writing today is experiencing a reinvention, providing malleable structures for narrating personal experience while loosening it from strict generic conventions, thus opening up new modes of seeing, understanding, and delineating the self today.
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