Fakt, Fiktion und Transparenz. Modi autobiographischer Selbstreferenz im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert

Abstract

This dissertation explores autobiography and autofiction from the perspective of transparency. Drawing on a variety of texts – from the German-speaking world as well as from Scandinavia, France, and the US –, it examines how autobiography and autofiction from the 20th and 21st centuries formulate a self-referential discourse regarding their own truth claims. While scholarship usually considers such meta-discourse to be optional and only addresses it when it is particularly excessive (cf. Michel Beaujour, 1980, or Manfred Schneider, 1986), it is argued here that such discourse is generally constitutive of autobiography’s factuality, granting it the power of worldly reference. Autofictional self-referential discourse, if it appears at all, is itself potentially absorbed by fictionality (a partly fictional narrating voice) and thus does not render a text factual.

Autobiography constructs a textual borderline between knowledge and non-knowledge which is independent of the question if verifiable knowledge is actually attainable on any side of the border. To be sure, autobiographical hoaxes can be debunked by empirical fact checks. But that such fact checks are performed in the first place presupposes the acknowledgement of a text as autobiographical (cf. Gabriele Schabacher, 2007). Moreover, the rhetorical self-referential discourse generally generates an effect which blocks potential impulses to fact-check what is narrated in an autobiographical text. This is achieved, as is argued here, by a narratology of transparency which paradoxically stages a knowledge about autobiographical non-knowledge which veils the impossibility of producing verifiable propositions on both sides of the textually constructed borderline 'knowledge/non-knowledge.'

Autobiography and autofiction mark – and play with – this boundary in a vast variety of modes. Chapters 1–4 systematize and analyze these modes within the framework of a new narratological account of autobiographical and autofictional transparency, while chapters 5 and 6 address the complex connections between self-reference and autobiographical probability and moral questions, respectively. The dissertation thus seeks to contribute to the theory of autobiography and autofiction as well as the theory of fiction in general – and takes a stance against panfictionalist approaches precisely at a time when the binary 'true/false' is under attack in political discourse. While seeking to explain how various modes of self-referential discourse render autobiography a factual genre, the dissertation also – and against this backdrop – contours the 'distinction of autofiction' (to modify a phrase from Dorrit Cohn, 1999), which can be conceived of as a "Kippfigur" or ambiguous image in Wittgenstein’s sense, oscillating between fact and fiction. The realm of (auto-)fiction is thus defended as a privileged space which escapes binaries such as 'knowledge/non-knowledge,' 'true/false,' 'probable/improbable,' or 'candor/deceit,' while autobiography is conceived of as a factual genre which remains tied to such binaries qua its self-referential discourse: even and especially where such discourse stages a skepticism related to them.