Literary subjects and figurations: the deviant autofiction of Dalia Rosetti

Abstract

This article sets out to think about the forms of construction of the discursive and fictional subject in the narrative of Dalia Rosetti, narrative heteronym of the Argentine poet Fernanda Laguna. In a sort of socioliterary revision of the death of the Author, Rosetti's novels exemplify the return of the authorial self in current narrative, seeking to resolve in the concrete the inequalities that the traditional concept of authorship, based on the idea of the modern subject, entailed, and that had not been compensated by the abstraction that its dissolution implied. But the returning author in Rosetti's novels deactivates, from many fronts, her alliance with the idea of the self that literature in general (and autofiction in particular) has promoted. The mismatches between the empirical author, the fictional author, the narrator and the characters make these novels an example of deviant autofiction, in which the self gradually fills its initial indefinition with everything that surrounds it, thus making possible the collectivization of the first person, which incorporates into its own narrative event subjectivities and experiences that are literarily underrepresented.