Lorena Nauschnegg is a doctoral candidate in the Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy” at Goethe-University Frankfurt, supervised by Prof. Johannes Voelz. She received a B.A. in Theater, Film, and Media Studies as well as in American Studies and completed an M.A. in American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt. From 2021 to 2023 she was a scholarship holder of the Deutschlandstipendium. Between 2024 and 2026, she coordinated the Writing Fellow-Program at Goethe University’s Writing Centre, where she currently works as research assistant and is responsible for English programming. Her research interests include 20th and 21st Century North American literature, contemporary literary theory (with a particular focus on narrative theory and reader response theory), and the intersection between literature and (political) aesthetics.

Contemporary Autofiction and the Aesthetics of Ambiguity

Can literature – not only in content but in form – be democratic? What might such a democratic literary form look like? And how does literature shape or enable our sensorial, affective experiences of democratic life? These are some of the central questions that guide my dissertation project Contemporary Autofiction and the Aesthetics of Ambiguity. With a particular focus on contemporary autofiction, a genre that has significantly risen in popularity over the past two decades, my project investigates how literary texts create spaces and moods that allow for democratic practices, sentiments, and ideas to appear. In the case of contemporary autofiction, my project argues, the key to the genre’s democratic potential lies in what I term its ‘aesthetics of ambiguity’: a literary style and narrative form that destabilizes clear categories and instead emphasizes and even plays with in-betweenness and uncertainty.

As a point of departure, my project situates itself at the junction between autofiction’s specific narratological form, its larger themes of (authorial) self-fashioning and self-determination, and the sociocultural context of the genre’s emergence, especially the structures and effects of (post)modernity and neoliberalism. Through an analysis of a variety of autofictional texts – among them works by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, Elif Batuman, and Valeria Luiselli – and a recourse to diverse analytical perspectives – such as the contextualization of autofiction within the literary history that precedes it, an examination of the relationship between aesthetic judgement and the literary marketplace, as well as an exploration of the genre’s approach to (narrative) voice and the participatory reading act that autofiction prompts –, my project aims to
create a field of inquiry that unravels the threads that bind autofiction and the contemporary sociocultural moment on the one hand, and that considers the wider role that ambiguity plays for and in democratic culture on the other.