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GOLDEN, CAMERON. Ph.D. Fictional Memoirs: Authorial Personas in Contemporary Narrative. (2006) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 173 pp. This dissertation examines fiction writers who include themselves as characters within their fictional constructions. I look at the cultural emphasis on simulation in contemporary society which creates a context for these figures, hybrids of truth and fiction, to exist within a fictional landscape. In this way, by problematizing classification and rejecting fixed definitions of fiction, the authors included in this study use a poststructural paradigm to undermine conventional thinking about gender, the modern role of the writer, the function of the memoir, and life writing as a means of explaining a life. By creating a pseudo-biographical life within the fictional text, these authors have found a way to critique our culturally constructed ideas about truth, fiction, and identity. I begin by looking at authors who investigate the imperative of locating authority in the writer and the failure of postmodern writers to live up to this expectation. Following this metafictional look at authors who find themselves unable to complete their own texts, I include an examination of contemporary rewriting of the trauma narratives associated with the Holocaust. In a world filled with simulations, telling the truth about this event, the responsibility of all those who write about the holocaust, is an impossibility and these authors all find an alternate mode of writing about this event. Next, I focus on authors who use themselves as characters to challenge conventional thinking about gender and identity, love and sexuality. These writers all incorporate themselves into their work to critique how simulations (family stories, fictional texts, academic commentaries) have dictated contemporary thinking about gender and sexuality. Finally, I use Mark Leyner to point towards a new conception of the author figure, one that moves out of postmodernism into another literary movement, avant-pop. Leyner’s view of “Mark Leyner,” is all simulation—a writer who is not an outside observer but the center of society—and points to another use of this author figure, one who celebrates the impossibility of making distinctions between truth and fiction in life writing and revels in the simulated life he has created for himself. FICTIONAL MEMOIRS: AUTHORIAL PERSONAS IN CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE by Cameron Golden A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2006 Approved by ________________________________ Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair______________________________________________ Committee Members______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _______________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 II. METAFICTIONAL MIRRORS: REFLECTIONS OF THE WRITING PROCESS .. 24 Victims and Villains in City of Glass.................................................................... 25 It s my story, not yours : Baxter and the Problem of Authority......................... 38 Seinfeld and the Presence of Absence................................................................... 46 Multivocality in Adaptation .................................................................................. 50 III. REMEMBERING AND REINVENTING: POSTMODERN VIEWS OF THE HOLOCAUST....................................................................................................... 58 Roth s Interpretive Puzzles ................................................................................... 60 Creating and Collaborating in Everything is Illuminated...................................... 73 I m a survivor : Larry David and the Cult of Suffering...................................... 79 IV. BODIES IN MOTION: SHAPE SHIFTERS IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE WRITING.............................................................................................................. 89 Body Language ..................................................................................................... 90 Siegel s Postmodern Problem ............................................................................. 105 V. I CROSSED THE PROSCENIUM AND MOUNTED THE STAGE! : POSTMODERN AND POSTHUMAN AUTHORS .......................................... 118 Ego Formation: Avant-Pop Life Writing ............................................................ 119 Authors and Automatons in Galatea 2.2............................................................. 137 iii VI. CONCLUSION......................................................................................................... 156 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 162 NOTES ........................................................................................................................... 171 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Telling the truth about the self, constituting the self as complete subject it is a fantasy. In spite of the fact that autobiography is impossible, this in no way prevents it from existing. --Philip LeJeune, On Autobiography (131-2) I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of non-fiction as I could in any of my novels. --Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park In his discussion of contemporary fiction, Raymond Federman observes that the New Fiction writers confront their own writing, insert themselves into their own texts in order to question the very act of using language to write fiction, even at the risk of alienating the reader (32). This trend of authors inserting themselves as characters in fictional texts, creating the illusion of an autobiographical element of these postmodern works, may have begun as a high brow literary experiment, but it has since filtered down into mainstream popular culture. In 2005, the comedian Sarah Silverman began filming a show for Comedy Central, playing the part of Sarah Silverman, and Julia Roberts played a woman who was forced to impersonate Julia Roberts in the film Ocean s Twelve.1 Jules Feiffer s A Room with a Zoo, a children s book featuring a cartoonist named Jules Feiffer was published in 2005, along with Bret Easton Ellis s Lunar Park, a novel about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis (written as a mock autobiographical novel [ Mirror Wyatt]).2 Inserting yourself into your own fictional work (such as these 1 novels, children s books, television programs, and films) has become a mainstream postmodern technique, but this approach is more than just a marker of a playful experiment. The pervasiveness of this maneuver in contemporary narratives both high and low proves that beyond this play lies a fascination with highlighting the constructedness of fiction (a hallmark of postmodern narrative) and a subsequent emphasis on the construction of the self. Just as late 20th century narratives disrupt form (think of works by Calvino, Eco, Nabokov), these types of narratives disrupt character. Authors that appear as characters within their own works force conventional thinking about identity and the self to be disrupted as well. And in doing this, these authors reconstruct an idea of identity that reflects our contemporary fascination for simulation at the expense of the real. Becoming a fictional character then becomes a way for writers to deconstruct all traditional modes of thinking about narrative. But beyond that effort lies the serious project of deconstructing authority, romantic and modernist ideas about the writing process, and the notion of a stable, integrated self. Fracturing the author in this way, breaking down the narrative walls between author and character and autobiography and fiction encourages a poststructuralist approach. If we accept that the author is the center of the work, then according to Derrida, after the rupture of the linked chain of determinations of the center . from then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. (960-1) 2 The author, contained within a myriad of different centers within these different structures, becomes a symbol of the decentering of authority inside this infinite field of freeplay. And, echoing Lejeune s thoughts on the impossibility of using a text to completely reflect a life, these author doubles themselves are incomplete. Essentially patched together, they represent the inability of the self to fully construct itself. The result of this failed attempt is a self that becomes a Frankenstein-like assemblage of truth and fiction, which mirrors the fusion of truth and fiction found in contemporary narrative. Martin Heidegger addressed the problem with self-fashioning in his discussion of the function of the poet: If being is what is unique to beings, by what

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