Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel
A probing, generative analysis of Knausgård's My Struggle, with implications for our understanding of the novel form more broadly in the twenty-first century.
Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has been widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre. Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgård confronts, challenges, and rejects the symbiotic relationship between novels and fiction, particularly via a technique of "auto-fictionalization." The fifth chapter then explores the further breakdown of this relationship in autofiction by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, taking readers to what Lerner called "the very edge of fiction."
Claus Elholm Andersen is Paul and Renate Madsen Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.