ABSTRACT
This chapter provides foundations for later critique of the relationship Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, Jean Genet and Hélène Cixous have with the genre of autobiography. It explores how autobiography as a genre has been perceived, both in life and death, by critical readers, focussing particularly on the variety and vacillation of expectations attached to what otherwise risks being thought of as a monolithic genre. The model of reader-relations operating in Doubrovskyan autofiction dictates that, in order to obtain an understanding of the written self they encounter, the reader must make an active, independent and imaginative contribution to realizing that self. The intellectual environment that has so shaped the thinking and practice of literary autobiography in France since 1945 is one dominated by structuralist and poststructuralist thought. The inauguration of what would now be recognized as autobiography study in France came with a far shorter work by Georges Gusdorf, published in 1956.
