From Confession to Autofiction (Inventions of the Self I) . ENGL 174CA

This course follows a genealogy of confessional and autobiographical writing in the West, from Rousseau's tussles with the concept of authenticity to the playful auto-fictional experiments by authors such as JM Coetzee and Sheila Heti. It traces how the western self's confidence in its capacity to articulate its own truth, or to ‘confess,’ was progressively undermined — first by the emergence of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious mind, and more recently by the science affect and memory — and characterizes the rise of auto-fiction as a creative response to the demise of secular confession, one that incorporates and thematizes the precariousness of our beliefs about authenticity, creativity, truth, and the very idea of the self.

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