"Autotheoryfictions", keynote by Lauren Fournier
Over the past decade, autotheory has emerged as a distinct field within literary studies, challenging longstanding distinctions between autobiography, life-writing, and literary theory by demonstrating how reflection on lived experience can itself function as a mode of theorizing. Although autotheory and autofiction are often understood as separate literary categories with distinct generic histories, many contemporary works engage autobiographical writing, theorizing, and fictioning in ways that neither category fully accounts for. Rather than approaching autotheory and autofiction as adjacent but separate literary categories—and continuing to ask the perhaps impossible question of where one category ends and the other begins—this keynote asks what becomes visible when they are read through the relations among autobiography, theorizing, and fictioning. From this inquiry emerges autotheoryfictions: a critical framework for reading—and writing—literary works that attends to the inextricability of "auto," theory, and fiction. This framework, in turn, makes visible new possibilities for interpretation when these practices are understood as entwined.
Rather than proposing a new genre, this keynote offers a critical framework for recognizing the simultaneous operation of autobiographical or memoiristic writing, theorizing, and fictioning across a range of literary works. Central to this framework is the proposition that every autobiographical work requires acts of fictioning—not in the sense that fictioning diminishes autobiography's truth claims, but in the sense that lived experience, as remembered and recalled, becomes legible only through literary acts of selection, composition, narration, and form. Within this framework, theorizing emerges through literary engagement with lived experience, recognizing personal experience not simply as the object of reflection but as a generative source of conceptual thought. Fictionalization, especially when discussing its relation to autobiography, is not reducible to fabrication but instead describes a spectrum of strategies through which writers shape lived experience into literary forms. At one end, fictionalization may involve acts of selection, arrangement, characterization, or narrative pacing; at the other, it may extend to speculation, imaginative invention, and outright fabrication. The point is not to displace questions of factual accuracy, which remain especially significant for autobiographical writing in a "post-truth" age, but to attend to the processes through which lived experience is rendered as literature. Attending to these literary processes makes visible the inextricable relationship between autobiographical writing, theorizing, and fictioning in hybrid and multi-genre life-writing.
Drawing on my research on autotheory as a contemporary literary and creative-critical practice with historical antecedents and bringing it into conversation with McKenzie Wark's concepts of "fictioning" and "facting," I develop autotheoryfictions as a framework for approaching literature categorized as autotheoretical or autofictional. In doing so, it proposes a new way of reading hybrid life writing that foregrounds the generative interplay of autobiography, theory, and fiction as mutually informing dimensions of literary practice.