UC Davis

“‘My style will become itself a part of my story’: A Study of Generic Innovations in the Life-Writing Narratives of Georges Perec and Camille Laurens,” examines how serial life-writers develop forms of writing that mirror the ways in which they work through trauma. I argue that the life-writing forms employed by these authors are as much a part of their writing project as the content of their narratives. The first chapter presents an overview of life-writing as a genre, with a particular focus on autobiography and autofiction. The second chapter analyzes the structure of Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and seeks to explain why two of its three narratives were conceived as fictions. The third and final chapter investigates the effects of repetition on Laurens’s autofictional corpus, especially the role of repetition in the characters’ understanding of themselves and of patterns of loss in their lives.