Autofiction and the Diary: The Radicalization of Autofiction in Works by Hervé Guibert and Christine Angot

Abstract

Autofiction has often been viewed as a hybrid of autobiography and the novel. This chapter argues that a new generation of writers who emerged from the 1990s onward drew heavily on the diary instead of autobiography to develop their own innovative autofictional forms and practices. Whereas some critics have argued that the diary is fundamentally attached to truth and resistant to fiction, Hervé Guibert’s Voyage avec deux enfants (“Journey with Two Children,” 1982) and Christine Angot’s Léonore, toujours (“Léonore, Always,” 1993) provide two examples of experimental writing projects where the diary provides the means for new modalities of truth and fiction, allowing the authors to adopt a new relation to their writing and the real world.