Inter-generic negotiations of autofiction, memory and history in Doris Lessing's under my skin

Abstract EN

In this paper, I attempt to investigate the compelling conceptions of Life- Writing's generic identity developing from the intersection of the modes of Autofiction, History and Memory in British writer Doris Lessing's Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 (1994).

I claim that the text is a ‗hybrid' one that interweaves three modes of writing: autofictional, historiographical and memory-oriented.

I will deal with reading Under My Skin in light of the emerging Autofiction theory, by exploring the concept of ‗autofiction, ' not only as a standalone genre, but also as an emerging writing technique.

With the hypothesis of Genre being fluid and dynamic, and a flexible canvas that allows its fixities to be demarcated and shifted, the expansion of focus from Autobiography to Autofiction will allow for an examination of History, Truth, Fiction, and Memory, in relation to the generic identity of the text.

A careful reassessment of the status of official and ‗fictionalized' accounts of the past in the text will be investigated, especially the ‗personal' stories of the impact of colonization and Empire, familial crises as well as personal learning journeys on Lessing's self-referential writing.

This probes the important question of how the fictional, autobiographical and autofictional reflect, directly and indirectly, aspects of Life-Writing.