Women's Autofiction
The past several decades have witnessed the rise of the autofictional novel. Coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 and originally associated with French experimental writers, the term has come to encompass an ever-expanding corpus of quasi-fictional texts. This panel focuses on the women at the vanguard of this genre: from Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) to Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), writers have blurred the line between truth and invention to explore and expose the artistic and existential conditions of female subjectivity. The frequently negative critical reception of their work (e.g.