Autofiction à la grecque: Greek autobiographical fiction (1971-1995)
This thesis examines the emergence and development of Greek ‘autofiction’ from 1971 until 1995, through the selected works of six writers: Kostas Tachtsis, Melpo Axioti, Vassilis Vassilikos, Vassilis Alexakis, Yiannis Kiourtsakis and Michel Fais.I have chosen to employ the term ‘autofiction’ (first introduced in 1977 by the French novelist and critic, Serge Doubrovsky) in order to define a specific type of autobiographical fiction that also discusses the process of writing. In autofiction, the extratextual author is identified with the narrator and a main character, who is a writer that explores the act of writing the self and the act of writing in parallel. My thesis is divided into two parts; the first covers the early period of Greek autofictional writing (1971-1975), while the latter focuses on the early nineties (1993-1995). During the first period of ‘autofiction’, which preceded the official coinage of the term, Tachtsis, Axioti and Vassilikos produced texts that do not simply employ autofictional techniques (such as the splitting of the subject) but also implicitly argue for the existence of Greek autofiction avant la lettre. The 1990s saw a new generation of novelists (Alexakis, Kiourtsakis and Fais) that surveyed new possibilities in identity construction. A staple of their writing is the construction of ‘dual’ identities within a postmodern context. They resulted in producing texts that present the authoring consciousness oscillating between two distinct cultural or even religious and linguistic identities. The ultimate aim of my dissertation is to put forward a term for the study of texts that have been vaguely labelled by Greek criticism as ‘autobiographical’ as I seek to prove that autofiction existed in Greece before the establishment of the actual term. By identifying its key characteristics and its divergences from its French
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