Self Writings and the Autofiction in The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Self Writing; Autofiction; Autobiography; Sylvia Plath.
The present dissertation proposes to investigate the novel The Bell Jar (1963), by Sylvia Plath, starting from a reading from the perspective of autofiction, a term coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s to characterize autobiographical writing practices through the model of fiction. Our proposal is to study the writer's authorial and factual presence, pointing out fictional events in the narrative that, supposedly, present autobiographical indications. Next, we will study how Sylvia Plath, as a female author, resorted to a narrative model inherent in her literary productions, which consist of a performance of herself through the emergence of feminist movements in the 1950s and 1960s. Excerpts from the book were examined, basing the analysis on an authorized biography of Sylvia Plath, as well as her own diaries. Thus, we assume that, although The Bell Jar (1963) was published before the emergence of the concept of autofiction, the novel presents resources and narrative compositions similar to an autobiographical text, however, written in the mold of fiction. The research had a bibliographical and investigative character, having as main theoretical assumptions texts by authors such as Bakhtin (2011a; 2011b), Lejeune (2008), Foucault (2006 and 2001), Barthes (2004a; 2004b) and Doubrovsky (1970).