Refracted Selfhood in Breast Cancer Autofiction: A Research-Creation Essay

Authors

  • Michelle Ryan Université d’Angers

Abstract

This research-creation essay explores the dynamic of shifting pronouns and narrative temporal positions in a collection of autofictional/autopathographical stories about breast cancer, Blue Breast. The essay opens with a short autofictional text about post-chirurgical tattoos and is written in the manner of New Narrative approaches to essay writing. New Narrative writers mix the personal with the collective, low with high culture, art with literature, to propose alternative modes of debate and conceptualization. The essay studies the collection, Blue Breast, as a “cycle”; the stories focus on specific moments in breast cancer treatment that intersect with the notions of time, dreams, intermedial perception, art and landscape. The formal potentialities of the short story cycle as a system allow the reader to move in and out of perspectives to piece together the narrative of a body fragmented by illness. Overall, the essay underlines the manner in which a strategic use of pronouns in autopathographical short story cycles can portray the collective experience of breast cancer through the prism of the personal experience.

Keywords: research-creation, New Narrative, autopathography, short story, intermediality, transmediation, autofiction, short story cycle, autobiography, breast cancer

Author Biography

Michelle Ryan, Université d’Angers

Michelle Ryan is Senior Lecturer at the Université d’Angers, France. She is the director of the European Network for Short Fiction Research and former editor of Journal of the Short Story in English. Her research focus is the short stories of contemporary women writers (Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall), with a special emphasis on intermediality, authorship, reading pragmatics and gender. Ms. Ryan has published essays in edited collections and journals such as Marvels and Tales, Journal of the Short Story in English, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Her current interests include the interconnection of short forms and digital media, and research-creation approaches to women’s autobiographical fiction.

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Published

2025-04-17

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 1 (2025): Variations pronominales

Section

ARTICLES

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