About

My research focuses on how reading practises shape and are shaped by autobiographical narratives in nineteenth-century France, twentieth-century and contemporary contexts. In my thesis, I ask how we might read autobiography in which there is no sure claim to truth. I draw on a corpus of ‘atuomemoir’ texts to chart the development of this tradition in parallel to conventional modern autobiography, starting with Rousseau’s Confessions.

Usually, the autobiographer makes an implicit or explicit claim to the veracity of her own testimony. Rousseau famously undertakes to do this when he describes the details of his infatuation with Mme de Warens. In the case of automemoir, the writer instead invokes the problem of autobiographical truth. My examination of automemoir includes textual analysis of works by Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Ernaux, Didier Eribon and Knausgård, amongst others. My thesis proposes the automemoir sub-genre of autobiography and argues for its instinctive recognition amongst readers.

As well as with traditional literary criticism, I work with digital humanities methods to study online reading communities and to analyse textual responses amongst diverse readerships. I have used machine learning to identify emotions in big datasets of online book reviews. You can listen to my contribution to After AI Symposium here, introducing my work on the use of  use of AI in representative literary analysis. I have also contributed to a project at The National Archives and The University of Brighton, making archival datasets more accessible and searchable using AI.

Recognition of the automemoir tradition contributes to scholarly discussions around autobiographical truth and testimony within literary, cultural and historical studies. Furthermore, it reinvigorates analysis of autobiographical works by authors that have been deemed hard-to-classify by scholars, such as Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe. It even reopens works at the very edge of fiction, such as Proust’s Temps perdu, to fresh analysis. My methodology of representative literary analysis, additionally, contributes to theoretical debates around genre and ‘what is reading?’ in relation to literary texts.