Contours of the autobiographical space: the literary self-portrait in Sergio Kokis

Abstract

Amongst the various (and controversial) modalities of self-writing, the literary self-portrait remains a field of little theoretical exploration. Though the term loaned from the visual arts field makes part of the literary creation since long, its conceptual approach still constitutes a slippery soil, especially in contemporary literature, where the hybridization of several subgenres of the autobiography may be observed. Attempting to contribute to the reflection on the self-projection in this particular category of self-writing, the present work aims at actualizing ideas by Michel Beaujour, who has carefully examined the theme in the 1980s, through a dialogue with recent analysis by Robert Dion and Frances Fortier. In this process, we create a theoretical basis to study autobiographical texts by Sergio Kokis, a painter and writer of Brazilian origin established in Quebec, particularly in his work L’amour du lointain (2012), a literary self-portrait that offers access to the backstage of Kokis’s fictional creation. Extrapolating the self-analysis exercise, Kokis proposes in this text a review of his Romanesque writing, by recovering certain tracks of his personal history in order to contribute critically and to establish his experience as a reader and a painter, yet revealing the inconsistencies and contrarieties of the labels imposed within the autobiographical writing field.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.30202