Ghost Writing the Self: Autofiction, Fictocriticism, and Social Media

[...]I demonstrate that fictocritical texts deserve just as much critical attention as autofictions when it comes to their mimetic relationship to digital, networked media and their implications for the future of self-authorship. [...]Heather Kerr has remarked that Barthes is the "exemplary practitioner" of fictocritical writing, "a kind of ... writing which takes place 'somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction'" (Hunter quoted in Kerr, "Fictocriticism"). In particular, clarion calls from Cixous to write from the body crossed oceans and inspired early fictocritical writing in Canada and Australia (Gibbs, "Bodies of Words"). [...]French poststructuralist theory can be seen at least as an antecedent to the subject under erasure employed in works of autofiction and fictocriticism, although the specifics of these terms and their applications have diverged in the decades since. Handheld video cameras and video game consoles introduced users to scenarios of reading media in which they oscillated between technical operations of the device and the performativity of playing, pretending, and memory-making.