Claus Andersen, Resident Fellow (2021-2022), will be giving a Friday Lunch lecture on Oct. 14th from 12:00pm-1:00pm. The title of the talk is “Is Autofiction Fiction? On Karl Ove Knausgård’s ‘My Struggle’ and the Autofictional Novel.” A catered lunch will be provided at this Friday Lunch event. Seats are limited and available on a first-come basis. To register, please send an email to rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu with your name, title, or affiliation.
More information about the talk:
Karl Ove Knausgård’s “My Struggle,” a monumental novel in six volumes and more than 3,600 pages, has become the preeminent example of a current autofictional trend. Widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre, “My Struggle” provides a sense of authenticity and intimacy that the contemporary novel has long been missing. Through an analysis of Knausgård’s extensive use of details and his radical character narration, I propose in my paper that “My Struggle” provides a blueprint for understanding autofictional novels more broadly, where the genre designation “novel” neither undermines the autobiographical aspect nor the commitment to reality.