Institut for Kultur og Samfund

Even though “‘Fiction’ is the vital element of phenomenology” according to Edmund Husserl, phenomenologists rarely use autofiction when carrying out imaginative free variation. In my dissertation “Life, Death and Love: Phenomenological Investigations into the Messy Nature of Authenticity” I used autofiction as one way of performing imaginative free variation. Eventually, a piece of autofiction I call “The Brother Chronicles” became a part of the phenomenological description of the phenomenon of authenticity. Phenomenological autofiction is a hybrid of personal and eidetic, descriptive and narrative, documentary and fictive. As narrative researchers questionably approach narratives as evidence for personal meaning confirming the search for ‘narrative truths’, phenomenological autofiction aims at revealing essences. In this presentation I will introduce the idea of autofiction as phenomenological description and suggest that narrative research could benefit from phenomenological insights related to imaginative free variation and ‘eidetic truths’.