ABSTRACT
I would like to start what will be the core theoretical chapter of this book by thanking Marie-Laure Ryan for drawing my attention to an article I might have never stumbled across had I not read her previously mentioned article “Narratologie et Sciences Cognitives: Une Relation Problématique.” Not only is it an enlightening piece for reasons already explained, but in its last part it also provides the reader with references to scientific research everyone dabbling in literary theory should have a look at. One of these references is Abraham, von Cramon, and Schubotz’s article intriguingly entitled “Meeting George Bush versus Meeting Cinderella: The Neural Response When Telling Apart What Is Real from What Is Fictional in the Context of Our Reality.” At the time I was writing “Making the Case for Self-Narration Against Autofiction,” one of my articles meant to question the validity of autofiction as a genre and establish the fundamental distinction between factual narratives and fictional narratives, this article would have fallen into my lap like a dream come true. Indeed, I was struggling to put forward not only literary but also cognitive evidence of this essential difference but never managed to irremediably drive the matter home (if such a thing is ever possible, especially with issues as non-scientific as a reader’s perception of a genre), even though I am sure my article may have resonated among theorists who considered that autofiction had taken the generic ambiguity a step too far. My point, already stated in Chapter 2, was that it is not possible to read a text, even one single sentence of this text, with exactly the type of indecisiveness Shields advocates. Unfortunately, I had only my rhetorical skills to try to convince readers. Abraham et al.’s article would have provided me with a considerable scientific backing, even if, and this needs to be stated loud and clear, scientific evidence is often not as conclusive, unequivocal, and long-lived as academics in the humanities think. But this article was published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (brought out by the MIT Press!), which appears, at least for a neophyte such as the author of this book, as having a high-recognition value within the scientific community, and consequently, the scientific data must have been thoroughly vetted.
