Philosophy + Literature Workshop with Annabel Kim: Autofiction as Exofiction
The Research Workshop in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts is proud to host a discussion via Zoom with Annabel Kim (Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University).
"Autofiction as Exofiction"
Contemporary French Literature's Identity Crisis
Annabel L. Kim is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. A specialist of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, Kim is the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State University Press, 2018) and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and the translator into English of Céline Minard’s Plasmas (Deep Vellum, fall 2024). Kim is also the editor of a special issue of Diacritics, "Citation, Otherwise," on the politics of citation, and co-editor, with Morgane Cadieu, of the latest issue of Yale French Studies, "Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig."
In the context of contemporary French literature’s turn toward the real, exofiction (fictionalized biography, roughly speaking) is often considered the antithesis to autofiction, its much better known and more visible literary cousin. Where autofiction is accused of as a narcissistic, navel-gazing form of writing, exofiction, as its prefix indicates, is framed as being turned outward, toward the world of history, the world of others, appearing to free exofiction from the self-enclosed reflexivity that is associated with autofiction. In this article, Kim takes up the exofictions of three well-known contemporary French authors—Laurent Binet, Emmanuel Carrère, and Yannick Haenel—in order to argue against this definitional opposition to claim, instead, that exofiction is indeed another form of autofiction, one that taps into the autos of the French nation, and is symptomatic of the collective identity crisis surrounding Frenchness in the twenty-first century.