Autofiction's Interrogation of Neoliberal Subjectivity

Abstract

Recent scholarship has highlighted the affinity between autofiction—a development in the contemporary novel that incorporates a fictionalized version of the author in the work—and the neoliberal economy. Through readings of contemporary autofictional novels by Nicole Krauss and Sheila Heti, this essay argues that autofiction—in addition to being a method by which the author can respond to the injunction to develop his or her own portfolio of human capital—is a form that interrogates the animating logics behind the contemporary subject of capital. Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) dramatizes the formation of the artist as neoliberal subject as the adoption of enterprise unification of purpose in order to function within the competitive field. Motherhood (2018) describes a writer in her late thirties who stages a confrontation between the cultural directive to have children and the demands of a subjectivity marked by the injunction to achieve continuous progress, even when none is available. Krauss’s Forest Dark. (2017) turns the critical lens back onto autofiction itself, pairing alternating narratives that coalesce to form a critique of autofiction’s ambiguous capacity to alter the author’s public image. All three novels conclude with an ambivalence toward the continual making of self that lies at the heart of both the subject of late capitalism and the autofictional gesture, and in so doing, reject the ubiquity of growth narratives in favor of a depiction of self-investment as a recursive, self-perpetuating circuit.