The way we socialize today is radically different from how it was only twenty years ago. Since the arrival of the Internet more and more of what we know about the lives of our friends comes from text-based social networks, or blogs. This means that we all, more or less, have become authors of our own life stories and that the reality we live in have become fictionalized. In this paper I explore what effects this postmodern process of dissolving boundaries has had on the autobiographical genre, where the line between fiction and reality is traditionally stressed. By analysing Carina Rydberg’s (b. 1962) autobiographical novel Djävulsformeln (2000) I reveal how the autobiographical genre has evolved during the postmodernist era and how Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical contract now commonly is replaced by a double contract (Poul Behrendt). This means that the contemporary autobiographical novel claims to be both a true story and made up, or, as Christian Lenemark calls it, true lies. To understand the mixed signals about whether the literary text is fiction or a true story the contemporary reader turns to the media and therefore authors more and more often choose to comment on and explain their works in interviews and articles to regain some control over how the text is perceived, thus overstepping the boundary of fiction. We have, as Lenemark puts it, a medialization of the role of the author. With the distinction between what is a depiction of reality and what is fiction, in a state of dissolution the traditional genre classifications have become dated. My claim is that the boundary between fiction and reality has imploded as an effect of the post- modern process and that readers today, like cultural consumers in general, look for "the real thing" but want a better reality than the one they get in real life. Traditional classifications like "autobiography", "reality" and "fiction" thereby no longer apply to contemporary literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-66230 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Torstensson, Matilda |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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