Transatlantic Intersections | NFC Visiting Doctoral Fellow Sonia Scarlat

Transatlantic Intersections: The Autofictional and the Metaliterary in Ben Lerner and Javier Marías

About the talk...

This talk explores points of convergence and divergence in the construction of auto- and metafictional narrative modes in Javier Marías’ and Ben Lerner’s novels. Specifically, I aim to compare the evolution of these modes across both authors’ seminal “auto” trilogies in order to analyze the fictional mutations their narrators experience throughout various texts. In this paper, I argue that what Marías and Lerner seek, above all else, is the construction of a fictionalized “I” whose voice permeates each novel even as their narrators shift. This voice is reflexive, essayistic, self-conscious and often ironic, allowing Lerner and Marías to move beyond the purely autobiographical and into the metafictional, openly questioning the construction of not only their respective novels, but also of their respective authorial personas. Finally, this paper seeks to examine how Lerner and Marías’ auto- and metafictional projects are complemented and challenged by the integration of photographs into the text as well as the conception of time the authors employ.

About the speaker...

Sonia Scarlat is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philology at the University of Salamanca. Her research focuses on the intersection of autofiction and metafiction in contemporary Spanish and North American literatures. In recent papers, she has examined the specifics of familial narratives and the use of photography in the construction of a personal archive (“The Value of Reality. The Document and Autofiction in Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre by Cristina Fallarás”; “El valor de lo real. El documento y la autoficción en Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre de Cristina Fallarás.”) as well as the affinities between self-portraiture and autofiction (“Strategies For a Collective Self-portrait: Autofiction and the Body in Lección de anatomía by Marta Sanz”; “Estrategias para un autorretrato colectivo: autoficción y cuerpo en La lección de anatomía de Marta Sanz”). Her doctoral thesis aims to propose a typology of auto-/metafictional modes across Spanish and American literatures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, with a particular focus on the comparative analysis of the works of Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, Philip Roth, and Ben Lerner.

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