The Fiction of Auto/biography. New Perspectives on the Ambiguity of Life-Writing/Reading

Abstract

New forms of life-writing in the digital age broaden the genre of auto/biography, complicating the question of authorship and hybridizing the borders between autobiography, biography and heterobiography. Especially the intermediality and virtuality of social media make the border between fiction and non-fiction fluid and emphasise the social frame (regime of truth) in which every subjectivation (Foucault/Butler) takes place. The editorial underlines the link between normative role models and non-normative subjectivity and discusses life-writing as an important arena of empowerment in which life-writing functions as an anti-hegemonic intervention deconstructing normative identity categories and articulating new forms of subjectivity. In addition, examples of life-writing reacting to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine are discussed in this context as epistemic disruptions which articulate antihegemonic interventions and at the same time create therapeutic potential. Following Olga Tokarczuk’s Noble lecture, contemporary life-writing is summarised in the context of cultural narratology.