[The Ambiguous Pact. Literary Texts in the Border-zone between Autobiography and Fiction]

The title of this volume [in English: ”The Ambiguous Pact. Literary Texts in the Border-zone between Autobiography and Fiction”], refers to a debate that has taken place in recent years among literary scholars: is it possible to draw a sharp line between fictional and autobiographical texts? Philippe Lejeune (Le Pacte autobiographique, 1975) suggested that this could be done by establishing what type of pact the author implicitly concludes with the reader. His theories are widely spread but also contested and recent research has focussed on the large field of generically hybrid, indeterminate texts that are neither traditional autobiographies nor entirely fictional. Some specialists have proposed to call such texts autofictions, a term spurned by others. The introductory chapter of this book summarizes the contributions made to this debate since the seventies (mainly in France) and tries to pinpoint the main reasons for disagreement and the questions left without satisfactory answers. Then follow eighteen case studies devoted to particular authors representing a wide range of cultural spheres. The authors discussed are the contemporary French writers Serge Doubrovsky, Marguerite Duras, Michel Houellebecq, and Éric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine (a contemporary Russian-born writer who publishes his books in French), Baudoin (a French artist who has produced several autobiographical comic strips), Fred Vargas, (a well-known French writer of detective novels), Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, French-speaking Belgian writer Jean Muno, French-Algerian writer Assia Djebar, Hélisenne de Crenne (a French writer from the sixteenth century), Spanish author Juan Goytisolo, three writers from Uruguay who have spent part of their lives in exile in Sweden (Carlos Liscano, Fernando Butazzoni, and Ana Luisa Valdés), Argentinean novelist Laura Alcoba, the poet John Hewitt from Northern Ireland, the contemporary German novelist Reinhard Lettau, the famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Lebanese writer Rashīd al-Da‛īf, and South-African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Each study is written by a different specialist. A complete list of the contributors and the universities they represent is presented as an appendix at the end of the volume