Chadova Elizaveta Vladimirovna – PhD student at the Department of History of Foreign Literatures, Saint Petersburg State University (SPbU); Assistant Lecturer at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU); ORCID: 0000-0001-6738-3235
This article explores the features of autofictional and autobiographical prose in Hélène Cixous’s work as a form of embodying her concept of écriture féminine (feminine writing). In its two main sections, the article uses the novels Hyperdream (2006) and Inside (1969) to analyze how Cixous blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction by merging elements of personal experience, philosophical reflection, and experimental poetics. The study aims to analyze the methods of representing subjectivity through autofictional prose. Cixous rejects linear narrative and a fixed position of the “I”, creating texts in which the subject is in a process of constant becoming. The concepts of autofiction, autobiography, and “altobiography” within the context of the writer’s oeuvre are analyzed. The conclusion is drawn that the genre-specific features of autofictional writing in Cixous’s texts enable her to explore themes of corporeality, memory, and motherhood. Cixous’s texts form an alternative genre model where the boundaries between fact and fiction, the self and the Other become fundamentally unstable, which is consistent with her idea of écriture féminine.
écriture feminine; autofiction; autobiography; Hélène Cixous; altobiography