Knausgard and the Autofictional Novel

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A probing, generative analysis of Knausgard's My Struggle, with implications for our understanding of the novel form more broadly in the twenty-first century.

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgard'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. Knausgard and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgard 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."