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 Coetzee and 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 of 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.