L'autofiction, une définition performative

This thesis focuses on the literary genre “autofiction”. It suggests to define it from a new angle: a performative definition. Drawing on the theories of autofiction, postmodernism, performance, poststructuralism, gender and queer, it focuses on showing what an author does or can do when they write the self in a context that questions the unity, the concordance and the mastery of the self as well as the limits of representation. Indeed, it seems that since the advent of many paradigm shifts in the way of conceiving and perceiving the individual, the world, writing and representation (what many have called postmodernism), autobiography simply cannot be written the same way today as it was several decades ago. Thus, following the study of these upheavals in sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history and linguistics, this thesis suggests the culturally constructed and socially performed character of the written self, before showing many links that this literary identity performance maintains with the world, its unfinished nature and its capacity to try to express what is unspeakable about and in the self.