Autofiction: Narrating the Sensitive

Challenging the view of autofiction as a hybrid of autobiography and the novel, this book redefines it as a mode of representing sensitive experience. The sensitive refers to ethically and emotionally charged personal experience — often difficult to articulate or represent — that becomes the object of narrative in autofiction, requiring new aesthetic forms and generating vulnerability, empathy, and ethical engagement between writer and reader. Through a comparative analysis of Russophone and French autofiction — particularly the works of Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, Oksana Vasyakina, Maria Stepanova, and others — this book explores how this narrative practice fosters a new ethics of writing grounded in empathy, affect, and the search for authenticity. Situated at the intersection of narratology, trauma theory, media theory, and cultural criticism, this study proposes to view autofiction not as a genre, but as a narrative practice of sensitive experience—one that shapes new forms of subjectivity in the context of political instability, digitalization, and the expanding modes of self-representation. This study will interest scholars of literature, memory and trauma studies, gender and media research, and anyone engaged with the evolution of life-writing in the twenty-first century.