Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has been widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre. Knausgrd and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgrd confronts, challenges, and rejects the symbiotic relationship between novels and fiction, particularly via a technique of "auto-fictionalization." The fifth chapter then explores the further breakdown of this relationship in autofiction by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, taking readers to what Lerner called "the very edge of fiction."
Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has been widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre. Knausgrd and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgrd confronts, challenges, and rejects the symbiotic relationship between novels and fiction, particularly via a technique of "auto-fictionalization." The fifth chapter then explores the further breakdown of this relationship in autofiction by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, taking readers to what Lerner called "the very edge of fiction."
