ABSTRACT
The mythic potency of narrative to naturalise worldviews has been famously captured by Roland Barthes. Recalling Barthes' emphasis on the powerful act of 'voiced' communication engaged in by myth-makers, it logical to argue that the genre that most obviously conflates the individual subject and their rendering of the world as story told for an audience is the autobiography. In women's autobiographical texts, the result of Marnie's marriage of the apparently incompatible genres of historically determined female subjectivity and literary self-portraiture has been proliferation of inventive departures from the coherent narratives of self-actualisation through public events characterising canonical male-authored autobiographies. Lena Dunham's narration in Not That Kind of Girl recognises implicitly, then, that stories and myths exceed authorial control to become the property of all who are exposed to them. For Annie Richard the narrative subject posited by autofiction – unlike its predecessor the ego – is an inherently ethical one, in the Levinasian sense of existing for the other.
