Reluctant Autofictionalists: Early Twenty-First-Century French and German Experiments with the Autofiction Genre

This thesis comprises six case studies of the twenty-first-century French and German autofictional novel by the authors Amélie Nothomb, Felicitas Hoppe, Michel Houellebecq, Thomas Meinecke, Clemens J. Setz, and Anne F. Garréta and Jacques Roubaud. This study is concerned with novels which, although they might not fully conform to the autofiction genre, are clearly aware of and respond to many of the same concerns with which the genre engages or which it raises. Significantly, while none of these texts adopt quite the same approach to genre subversion, they can all be read as experimentations with the autofiction genre, with the various aims of affirming or critiquing it, or drawing attention to related concerns regarding contemporary (first-person) narrative conventions and storytelling. Precisely because autofiction is experiencing a surge in popularity, on the one hand, and because it is a genre that, despite its inherent difficulties in terms of reception, is often approached by readers in quite a careless, biographical manner, on the other, it lends itself as a genre through which contemporary authors may explore newer developments in novelistic genres and contemporary forms of storytelling more broadly. As my close readings and engagement with relevant theories of autofiction, genre, and narratology will show, these novels demonstrate an extreme self-awareness and self-consciousness with regards to their generic status and engage in explicit or implicit dialogue with autofiction and genre theory. They make use of postmodern tools such as metafictionality and extremely complex associative narrative structures in order to subvert both the autofictional character's authority and the reader's expectations. However, as this thesis argues, these novels are not representative of an entirely new genre or literary era, even though the more experimental and open-ended texts in the latter half of this study gesture toward potential changes in the future, as influenced by models of digital textuality.