Paul De Man famously argues that an autobiography is a mask that distorts the face it covers; this seminar wishes to discuss the flip side of that coin: fiction that masquerades as autobiography—which is one possible definition of autofiction. The only consensus autofiction invokes is that its definition is disputed (Mortimer 2009), as a genre, a mode of writing (Ferreira-Myers 2018) or reading (Effe & Gibbons 2022), or as a strategy to cope with the instability of truth, memory, and identity in contemporary culture. Hailed as the genre that encapsulates our cultural moment—be it the post-Truth or the Selfie era—autofiction poses a challenge to literary critics: do we need to revise the generic and narratological terms with which we analyze autofiction's system of referentiality? Is there anything new about autofiction—or is it a modification of known genres such as memoirs, autobiographies, or even historical fiction? More broadly, does the inflation of autofiction have anything to do with the crisis of readership we witness in the past couple of decades? Could it be that literature becomes increasingly self-reflexive—perhaps self-obsessed—as it becomes irrelevant? 

Autofiction is a global phenomenon with particular manifestations and reception in various contexts. The term first appeared in Serge Doubrovsky’s work, one that is deeply informed by Jewish trauma (Boulé 2009). We propose to intersect the transnational system of autofiction with another global literary system: Jewish literature. Written in English, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish (and more), and with long standing traditions of grappling with self-reflexivity, intertextuality, identity, diasporic/minoritarian as well as hegemonic and settler-colonial positions, we propose Jewish literature as one possible arena to explore autofiction's deceptions. We would like to respond to the idea that Jewish identity is produced through texts and their reading rather than take a coherent notion of Jewishness for granted (Schreier 2015). Can we identify specific characteristics of Jewish autofiction? If so, how do these negotiate contemporary tensions of Jewish identity? How does contemporary autofiction of Jewish writers correspond with past iterations of Jewish self-writing?

Papers may relate to the rise of autofiction in the digital age, the allowance it grants younger writers to access autobiography, its expression of authorial anxieties prevalent among white, male authors vs. the participation of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community in writing autofiction. Papers exploring the terms in narratology and genre theory that autofiction intentionally blurs, as well as studies of cases that redefine the borders between fact and fiction are also welcome. We also invite papers that study the history of autofiction in Jewish literature as well as contemporary examples of Jewish autofiction.