Border Crossings: Towards a New Typology in Contemporary Immigrant Writing
Rezumat
Abstract: This paper reveals how contemporary immigrant authors challenge the conventions of autobiography as conceptualized by Philippe Lejeune in self-referential novels that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, storytelling and truth-telling. We investigate the reality-fiction binary in the works of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, W.G. Sebald, Aleksandar Hemon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz, and Ocean Vuong, and show how their self-referential literary productions alter the way we perceive notions of truth and authenticity in contemporary literature. By combining a reader-oriented analysis with a postructuralist inquiry on writing and reading, we aim at providing a more comprehensive understanding of life writing in transnational immigrant narratives.
Keywords: immigrant literature, life writing, autobiography, self-referential writing, truth, authenticity, storytelling.
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