AUTOFICTION AS A MEDIUM OF MNEMOHISTORY IN THE CONTEXT OF PARADIGM TRANSFORMATIONS
AUTOFICTION AS A MEDIUM OF MNEMOHISTORY IN THE CONTEXT OF PARADIGM TRANSFORMATIONS

Summary/Abstract: One of the most significant genres in Western contemporary literature is autofiction. Its orientation towards remembering the individual past and history has provoked reflections on a transformation of cultural paradigm and linked to the development of mnemohistory and the concept of literature as the shapers of cultural memory. This paper examines the autofiction genre as the mnemohistorical medium through which individual memories are expressed. Using the insights of individual postmodernist and metamodernist theorists as sources, we can see the changes in autofiction over the past decades. Since the first decade of the 21st century, in Latvian prose, we can see various elements of autofiction and differentiate some groups of texts. A vivid contemporary autofiction is Svens Kuzmins’ novel Brīvībene (Orbīta, 2024). The article aims to characterise Kuzmins’ autofiction in the context of postmodernism and metamodernism, highlighting reinterpreting historical events through personal lenses as an eventual example of paradigm transformation and the medium od mnemohistory. The study’s results show oscillations between documentary facts and fiction, irony and sincerity, and the search for identity, historicity, and depth. These mark the existence of several elements of metamodernism and demonstrate that literature can be an active participant in the process of mnemohistory. Metamodernism and mnemohistory share a position of active engagement, focusing on reinterpreting the past to create meaningful frameworks for the present.

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