Autofiction, autotheory, autobiography, or biography?

This presentation is a part of the course “The Best French-Language Books of the Year” (Spring VT2026, FR1PGC) organized in collaboration with the Institut français de Suède. It examines the renewed prominence of first-person narratives in contemporary French-language literature. While the autobiographical model (traditionally grounded in Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”) rests on the promise of truth and the identity between author, narrator, and protagonist, recent literary works increasingly challenge this framework.Through a close reading of four major publications from 2025 (Nathacha Appanah’s La nuit au cœur, Emmanuel Carrère’s Kolkhoze, Camille Lamarche’s Le bel obscur, and Laurent Mauvignier’s La maison vide), this presentation explores how contemporary writers reconfigure the status of the narrative “I.” These texts move beyond classical autobiography toward hybrid forms such as autofiction, which foregrounds the instability of subjectivity and the tension between lived experience and narrative construction, and autotheory, in which personal experience becomes a site of critical reflection on social, political, and historical structures.Rather than guaranteeing the truth of a life story, these works interrogate the very conditions under which self-narration becomes possible. The first person is no longer a stable anchor of authenticity, but a dynamic space where memory, trauma, ideology, and collective history intersect. By situating these recent publications within ongoing theoretical debates, the session offers students conceptual tools to understand how contemporary French-language literature reinvents the relationship between self, fiction, and knowledge.