“Ernaux” the narrator refers to herself/the protagonist as “she” ( elle) and to her generation or peer-group as “we” ( nous). It avoids the first-person singular pronoun and, instead, oscillates between the third-person singular ( elle/she) and the first-person plural ( nous/we). The form of Annie Ernaux’s Les Années is highly experimental. Amplified narrative agency can manifest itself, for example, as enhanced awareness of one’s possibilities of action, affect, and thought in relation to one’s narrative environments and as the ability to imagine different modes of living a fulfilling life. Narrative agency can be amplified or diminished, and agentic power is unevenly distributed both within societies and across the globe. Our narrative agency means our ability to navigate our narrative environments: use and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyze and challenge them, and to practice agential choice over which narratives we use and how we narratively interpret our lives and the world around us. The concept of narrative agency signals that culturally mediated narrative interpretations play an important role in constituting us as subjects capable of action, while simultaneously alerting us to how narrative agency is socially conditioned. However, I have argued (Meretoja 2018, 11–12) that the narrative dimension of agency is not merely at play in processes of self-interpretation, but forms, more broadly, a constitutive aspect of our agency as we participate, through our actions and inactions, in narrative practices that perpetuate and challenge social structures. The notion of narrative agency has been used to foreground the role of narrative self-interpretation in bringing about the “integration of the self over time”-a process that is “dynamic, provisional and open to change and revision” (Mackenzie 2008, 11–12). In particular, I analyze the affordances of metanarrative autofiction by focusing on how it deals with the nature and conditions of narrative agency. Metanarrative autofiction, in distinction from metanarrative autobiography, focuses in addition on the relation between the real and the imaginary, as is characteristic of autofiction in general, and often employs experimental narrative strategies in the process. ![]() My notion is thus also different from what one might call metanarrative autobiography-a term that Bianca Theisen uses for autobiographical texts that highlight the “codes that have governed the writing of autobiographies” ( 2003, 11), and which could logically also be used to designate autobiographical texts reflecting on the act of narration in general, as well as those reflecting on cultural narrative templates. While metafictional autofiction focuses on issues of fictionality in narrating lives, metanarrative autofiction, as I define it, reflects on the role of narratives (both fictional and nonfictional) in the processes in which we make sense of our lives. In this chapter, I explore how what I call “metanarrative autofiction” makes narrative its theme through critical engagement with cultural narrative models of sense-making. These approaches leave out two central dimensions of self-reflexive storytelling: metanarrative fiction is characterized by critical reflection on, first, the significance of cultural narratives for individuals and communities and, second, the functions of narratives in our lives. ![]() This is particularly salient in autofictional writing, which centers on the relationship between the real and the imaginary, life and its narrativization. While metafiction (Hutcheon 1980 Waugh 1984 Currie 2014) was a key characteristic of postmodernist literature and art, an important form of self-reflexivity in contemporary literary fiction is “metanarrativity”-self-aware reflection not only on the narratives’ own narrativity but also on cultural processes of narrative sense-making and on the roles that narrative practices play in our lives. Contemporary fiction is increasingly responding to this trend by critically reflecting on how cultural narrative models shape our lives. The notion of finding one’s own narrative has pervaded culture at large, and it has been put to extensive commercial use. ![]() While the view that narrative is integral to humans’ mode of making sense of the world has shaped the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences since the 1980s (Ricœur 1983 Hyvärinen 2008 Meretoja 2014), in the twenty-first century society more broadly has become obsessed with narratives (see Polletta 2006 Salmon 2010 Fernandes 2017 Mäkelä & Meretoja 2022).
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