Autobiographic tradition and auto-fiction in the contemporary Latin American literature

Abstract

Autofiction has become an artistic and theoretical tendency since 1977, when Serge Doubrovsky invented the term to describe his novel Fils, in which he challenged the fundamental principles of autobiography —the identity of name of author, narrator and main character, as well as the autobiographical pact proposed by Philippe Lejeune in 1975. Even though autobiography and its theoretical difficulties (laid out since the 60’s) are the origin of autofiction, it has followed the route of fictional writing and has opened other doors to the study of the consequences derived from the presence of the author in the text. Although Spanish American literature was unaware of the theoretical discussion, it explored on its own this field recently discovered in France. In this paper I propose to track the development of an autobiographical tradition in Spanish America and its relation with the origin of texts that, as they usurped the autobiographical self, developed similar characteristics of what we know as autofiction.