Stefan Kjerkegaard

Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right: Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books

On the basis of readings in several self-fashioning and thought-provoking novels by Philip Roth this article seeks to rethink a limited set of narratological core concepts such as fiction and fictionality in light of their treatment within recent theories on narrative communication by James Phelan (2011) and Richard Walsh (2007). I will argue in favor of a simpler and more rhetorical model than used by these two leading scholars within narratological studies. According to the definition employed in this essay, the self-fashioning novel uses autobiographical material and means with the intention of reaching specific aesthetic ends. These means might include the author’s name, as in autofiction, or other material such as gender and correspondence in history and identity. Autofictional novels use and abuse the autobiographical contract where author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name. Hence, some autofictions try to hide the fact that they are novels by assimilating autobiographical genres such as autobiography, confession, or memoir, while other autofictions are in fact more or less autobiographies, but use rhetoric related to and imported from fiction. I shall read Roth’s novels consecutively, as gradually developing new understandings of reality and identity, and trace the intersections of aesthetics and ethics in Roth’s body of works. For the most part, my focus will

Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: A Real Life in a Novel

ABSTRACT In this study of Karl Ove Knausgaards My Struggle, the authors theorize what paratextual information does to ones reading, especially in autobiography-informed literature. Although My Struggle can be read both as memoir and novel, and even as autofiction, Knausgaard is aiming at a higher truth, where the genre label does not undermine the autobiographical quest but supports it.

In the Waiting Room: Narrative in the Autobiographical Lyric Poem, Or Beginning to Think about Lyric Poetry with Narratology

Autobiographical lyric poetry seems to present three main issues for theorists of lyric and narrative: (1) how do lyricality and narrativity relate in such poems, and how does this relation relate to poetic voice; (2) where do these poems situate themselves in the fiction/nonfiction divide; and (3) how do the specifically poetic devices contribute to their signification?1 There are no one-size-fits-all answers, but the three issues, and their solutions, seem to be interrelated, and the consequences of these positions will become evident in the analysis of autobiographical lyric poems, among which I will place two—“In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop and “Autobiography” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti—at the fore in a moment. First, however, I will outline a number of solutions and discuss the theoretical implications of these in more detail. First, we can say that typically autobiographical lyric poetry has some roots in events in the poet’s life, but the rendering of those events in poetic lyric transforms them in a few ways: (a) narrativity gets reduced and lyricality gets emphasized (otherwise we have autobiographical narrative poetry); (b) the question who speaks? becomes pertinent at the same time as this question is distorted by the lyrical transformation; and (c) the reader’s conceivable expectation of narrativity (and