Abstract as per original application
(English/Chinese): |
Autofiction has become a central facet of 21st-century Anglophone literature. By using (and disputing) the term “autofiction,” writers, publishers, readers, and critics have produced a new literary mode. Yet few have a clear sense of what this literary event means: muddled definitions and mixed feelings prevail. Some see autofiction as a simple hybrid—part autobiography, part fiction. Others stipulate that in autofiction, author, narrator, and protagonist must share a name and biography. Some are intrigued when writers put themselves at stake in their work. Others lament that the novel’s imaginative capacities should be reduced to gossip.
Despite these differences, the event of autofiction has become impossible to ignore. In gathering preliminary data for this project, we identified more than two thousand different literary texts which have been described as autofiction. Some autofictional works are becoming canonical, with their authors winning prizes and posts. Because autofiction provides analytical leverage on contemporary literature as such, it matters for criticism. Autofictions are necessarily stories about writers and writing, and they articulate the lived experience of constructing the literary field, from enacting authorship on social media to experiencing precarity in the humanities. Finally, autofictional texts matter because they pervasively attend to central concerns of contemporary literary studies: ethical-political relationships with friends, strangers, and communities; more-than-human relationships with animals, materialities, and environments.
Still, problems of novelty and definition mean that criticism of autofiction in English remains scattered and selective. We therefore begin by empirically investigating the emergence of autofiction as a concept and practice. Who writes autofiction, who publishes it, and who reads it? Who uses the word, and how? How has autofiction become an event in English-language literatures? To answer these questions and take criticism in new directions, we turn to the tools of computational literary studies (CLS). CLS is an aspect of digital humanities which adopts methods from corpus linguistics and natural language processing to understand literature. Collecting several hundred core autofictional texts, we digitize these works and conduct a comprehensive, multidimensional quantitative analysis. We employ established word frequency and genre analysis metrics, as well as more experimental techniques based on artificial intelligence and large language models. Ultimately, our project is cutting-edge not only because it provides new insight into an emerging genre, but because it offers a case study for what criticism can become when humanists take advantage of new reading and research technologies.
自小說是21世紀英語文學的一個重要面向。然而，鑒於其定義模糊，較少人清楚理解這一文學事件的意義。有人認為自小說是一種簡單的混合體——部分自傳加上部分虛構。也有人認為，在自小說中，作者、敘述者和主人公必須具備同一名字及生平。儘管存在理解上的差異，自小說這一事件已無法忽視。我們在為該計劃收集初步數據時，找到了兩千多部被歸類為自小說的文學文本。自小說必然是關於作家和寫作行為的故事，這些故事表達了構建文學場域的實際經驗，包括在社交平台上扮演作者角色以及在人文學科中體驗危脆狀態。自小說文本之所以重要，是因為它們普遍關注當代文學研究的核心問題，例如與朋友、陌生人和社區的倫理政治關係，以及與動物、物質性和環境的超人類關係。
然而，由於概念的新穎及定義模糊，英語自小說的批評既分散又具有選擇性。因此，我們首先通過實證研究來探討自小說如何作為一個概念和寫作實踐出現。誰在寫自小說？誰在出版？誰在閱讀？誰在使用這個概念？如何使用？自小說如何在英語文學中成為一個事件？為了回答上述問題並將相關的文學批評引向新的方向，我們借助計算文學研究（CLS）的工具。CLS是數碼人文學的一部分，採用語料庫語言學和自然語言處理的方法來理解文學。我們收集了幾百部重要的自小說文本，將這些作品數碼化，並進行綜合的多維定量分析。還採用已建立的詞頻及文類分析指標，以及基於人工智能和大型語言模型的更具實驗性的技術。
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