Criticism and fiction: An autofiction experience. Serge Doubrovsky and Raymond Federman

Abstract

The article looks at the origins of the concept of autofiction and compares S. Doubrovsky’s and R. Federman’s theories, emphasising the influence of American criticism on the concept’s development. Although often referred to as a hybrid genre first emerging in France in the 1970s and combining fictional and factual events, ‘autofiction’ at its inception was understood as a special narrative practice of traumatic self-reflection through the concept of fiction. In Doubrovsky’s critical works, fiction emerges not as a product of imagination but as a psychoanalytical practice of entrusting one’s experiences to writing. In parallel with Doubrovsky, another scholar, the French-American novelist of Jewish descent Raymond Federman, challenges the limitations of the traditional autobiography. His manifesto, Surfiction (1973), reflects on the boundaries between reality and fiction and questions the very possibility of an autobiographical experience representation. Along with Doubrovsky, Federman views autobiographical writing as an attempt to render a not-to-be-represented and traumatic experience.