Exofiction as Autofiction: Contemporary French Fiction's Identity Crisis

Abstract: In the context of contemporary French literature's turn toward the real, exofiction (fictionalized biography, roughly speaking) is often considered the antithesis to autofiction, its much better known and more visible literary cousin. Where autofiction is accused of being a narcissistic, navel-gazing form of writing, exofiction, as its prefix indicates, is framed as being turned outward, toward the world of history and the world of others, free from the self-enclosed reflexivity associated with autofiction. In this article, I take up the exofictions of three well-known contemporary French authors—Laurent Binet, Emmanuel Carrère, and Yannick Haenel—in order to argue against this definitional opposition to claim, instead, that exofiction is indeed another form of autofiction, one that taps into the autos of the French nation and is symptomatic of the collective identity crisis surrounding Frenchness in the twenty-first century.