SITUATING AUTOFICTION in SIEGFRIED SASSOONS LIFE WRITINGS

Abstract

SITUATING AUTOFICTION IN SIEGFRIED SASSOON S LIFE WRITINGS AN ABSTRACT SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH BY SHASHI BHUSAN NAYAK newlineREGD. NO: 11PH-ENG-003 newlineUnder the Supervision of PROF. MADHUSMITA PATI 2018 newlineABSTRACT This dissertation aims at exploring a less explored area of life writing, that is, autofiction, and aims to establish that this form of writing deserves a special status under the broader spectrum of life narratives. Siegfried Sassoonand#8223;s works on his life serves as the case study for this research. Autobiography as a genre has created a space for itself in presenting the retrospective account of life. However, human aspiration is varied and so are the forms of expression of the selfand#8223;. Humans have always explored in different ways of self-expression in literary writing as well as other forms of art. Autobiography as a genre typically set to express the self could not cater to the content of all while writing their life stories. The reason being the inability of the humans to lay bare the truth. So the yearning has always been to speak about oneself or tell oneand#8223;s story in different forms and as a consequence today we have several established and semi-established self-expression forms. Autobiography, as stated above, could not cater to the gratification of human heart and today we talk of varied forms of life writings like autofiction, faction, surfiction, metafiction and auto-narration etc. But all these forms have yet not become an acceptable genre or subgenre of self-expression. Critics have taken up the analysis of life writing with lot of seriousness and more they have probed into such expression more content they are that self-expressions have been attempted in several modes and each mode has a unique feature separating it from the other. newlineTaking autofiction as a genre which is an accepted form of self-expression for the French critics, this thesis will analyse the works of Siegfried Sassoon. The major critics who