The autobiography in the country of polemic

Abstract

This article has Philippe Lejeune’s pathway as its point of departure, for having introduced the concept of the autobiographical pact in L’autobiographie en France (1971), his first book. It then visits his controversy with philosopher Georges Gusdorf, who criticized him for his rhetorical approach, his formalist and disembodied perspective of autobiographic writing. Finally, it renders the rise of autofiction by Serge Doubrovsky. Following, the article criticizes the polarization between both concepts, by demonstrating how reductionist it can be. The concept of autofiction is then explored in three main trends: the orthodox, which strictly follows Doubrovsky’s proposal; Jacques Lecarme’s, which expands it to encompass 20th-century authors previous to the term’s coinage; and Vicent Colonna’s heterodox trend, which applies it to any historical period whenever an author nominally inserts himself into his work. Besides, after comparing autofiction’s seductiveness to autobiography’s apparent ancientness, the text analyzes the concept of the autobiographical space, created by Lejeune.

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Original in French.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.31607