
The literary and intellectual trajectory of Chris Kraus represents a significant shift in the landscape of contemporary letters, marking the point at which the traditional boundaries of art criticism, philosophy, and personal narrative dissolved into a new, hybrid form of expression. Born in 1955 in the Bronx and raised in New Zealand, Kraus’s early career as an experimental filmmaker and performance artist in New York provided the avant-garde foundations for her eventual emergence as one of the most influential writers and editors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her debut novel, I Love Dick, published in 1997 by Semiotext(e), did not merely introduce a new voice; it inaugurated a methodology of writing that equalised high theory with the raw, often abject experiences of female desire and failure. This movement, now frequently categorised under the banners of autofiction and autotheory, challenges the historical patriarchal logic that has long associated women’s creative output with the purely private and confessional, while reserving the realms of the universal and the objective for male intellectualism.
The Multifaceted Intellectual Architecture of Chris Kraus
To comprehend the profound impact of I Love Dick, it is necessary to first examine the intellectual and artistic milieu from which Chris Kraus emerged. Before turning to fiction, Kraus spent nearly two decades in the New York experimental scene, engaged in performance art and filmmaking. This period was characterised by a rigorous engagement with economic theory, acting, and the aesthetics of failure — themes that would later become central to her literary output. Her move to Los Angeles in the 1990s coincided with a shift in her creative practice, as she began to translate the concerns of performance art into the medium of the novel.
Kraus’s early biography is marked by a unique geographical and cultural displacement. Born in New York, she emigrated to New Zealand in 1969 under the government’s Assisted Passage Scheme. This transition was formative; she attended Wellington High School and later Victoria University of Wellington, where she was an exceptionally precocious student, receiving a Wellington Publishing Scholarship in Journalism at just sixteen years of age. During her time in New Zealand, she worked as a journalist for the Sunday Times and the Evening Post, providing her with a foundational grounding in the rigours of reporting — a skill she would later repurpose in her “non-fiction novels”. Kraus has credited this move to New Zealand with “saving her life,” suggesting an early rupture with the American mainstream that allowed her to develop an outsider’s perspective.
Returning to New York in her early twenties, Kraus immersed herself in the city’s burgeoning avant-garde. She studied acting with Ruth Maleczech of the renowned Mabou Mines collective and engaged with economic theory under Arthur Felderbaum at the New York School for Marxist Education. This combination of performance training and Marxist critique created a unique intellectual substrate. Her work during this period included the highly acclaimed play Disparate Action/Desperate Action (1980) and several experimental films, culminating in the feature-length Gravity & Grace (1996).
The Evolution of Kraus’s Literary and Artistic Career
| Period | Primary Activity | Key Works/Roles | Theoretical Influence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970s | Journalism (NZ) | Sunday Times, Evening Post | Professional reportage, factual accuracy |
| 1980s | Performance/Plays | Disparate Action/Desperate Action | Acting theory, Marxist economics |
| 1983-1996 | Experimental Film | Gravity & Grace | Aesthetics of failure, French theory |
| 1990-Present | Editorial (Semiotext(e)) | Founder of ‘Native Agents’ | Post-structuralism, French autofiction |
| 1997 | Novelist Debut | I Love Dick | ‘Ficto-criticism’, autotheory |
| 2000-2012 | Fiction/Criticism | Aliens & Anorexia, Video Green, Torpor | Life-writing, art history, globalism |
| 2017-Present | Biography/Essays | After Kathy Acker, Social Practices | Intersectional feminism, artistic archives |
Kraus’s transition from filmmaking to writing was prompted by what she perceived as the “debt and disappointment” of her film career. Gravity & Grace, which was adapted from the sociological classic When Prophecy Fails, became a central motif in her subsequent writing, representing the agony of investing belief in a project that ultimately fails to gain public traction. This experience of failure was not merely a personal setback but was transformed into a theoretical tool. In Kraus’s work, failure is depicted with such clarity that it becomes a transformative “alchemy,” allowing the author to critique the exclusionary structures of the art world.
Semiotext(e) and the “Native Agents” Series: Changing the Face of Theory
Kraus’s role as a co-editor of the independent press Semiotext(e), alongside Sylvère Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, placed her at the centre of the introduction of French theory to an American audience. Founded in 1974 as a journal emerging from a semiotics reading group at Columbia University, Semiotext(e) became famous for its “Foreign Agents” series, which published the works of thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. However, Kraus’s specific contribution was the founding of the “Native Agents” series in 1990.
The “Native Agents” series was designed to push back against the expectation that female writing, particularly “confessional” writing, should exist within a repentant or therapeutic framework. Kraus sought to publish work that utilised the same public ‘I’ found in French theoretical texts but applied it to first-person female fiction. She wanted to “communicate complicated ideas in an accessible way” by introducing fiction that operated with the same intellectual gravity as philosophy. The series featured writers such as Eileen Myles, Cookie Mueller, Kathy Acker, and Ann Rower, creating a community of authors who used their own lives as raw material for radical subjectivity.
Through Semiotext(e), Kraus helped forge a “high/low” aesthetic that remains central to her project. This aesthetic equalises “high theory” with underground culture, a synthesis that was first articulated in the famous Schizo-Culture issue of 1978, which brought together John Cage, William S. Burroughs, and Michel Foucault. Kraus’s own writing is the ultimate manifestation of this project, oscillating between esoteric referencing and colloquial street slang, thereby dismantling the hierarchies that traditionally separate academic thought from lived experience.
I Love Dick: A Case Study in Theoretical Obsession
Published in 1997, I Love Dick is structured as an epistolary novel that chronicles the obsessive pursuit of a cultural critic named Dick by a character named Chris Kraus. The narrative begins when Chris, a thirty-nine-year-old unsuccessful filmmaker, and her husband, the philosopher and Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer, spend an evening with a media theorist known only as Dick. This encounter triggers a psychosexual infatuation in Chris, which she and Sylvère decide to transform into a collaborative art project. They begin writing letters to Dick, using the “Crush” as a vehicle to explore their own marriage, creative failures, and intellectual preoccupations.
The Narrative and Structural Duality of the Text
The novel is famously split into two distinct parts, reflecting a shift from collaborative gamesmanship to a solitary and profound philosophical exploration.
- Part One: Scenes from a Marriage: The first half focuses on the interaction between Chris and Sylvère as they co-author the obsession. This section is often perceived as a “caffeinated” intellectual game, where deconstruction becomes a way to maintain intimacy in a sexless marriage. They write letters to Dick and call him just to listen to his answering machine message, fantasising about how they could pitch their adult foray into adolescent romance as a conceptual art project.
- Part Two: The Solitary ‘I’: As the relationship between Chris and Sylvère begins to fray, Chris continues the project alone. Her letters evolve into far-reaching essays on art history, politics, and the experience of being a woman in a male-dominated intellectual sphere. The “Dick” of the title becomes increasingly peripheral, serving as a “Dear Diary” or a “vehicle” for Chris’s own self-development.
The power of I Love Dick lies in its refusal to pathologise the protagonist’s obsession. Instead of treating Chris’s infatuation as a sign of mental instability or “female hysteria,” the text treats it as a disciplined form of inquiry. Kraus suggests that for women, the act of “talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public” is a revolutionary act. This is what she terms “Lonely Girl Phenomenology” — the belief that by making one’s private problems social and public, they can be transformed into a new kind of philosophy.
The Real-World Dick: Privacy, Contention, and Ethics
While the character Sylvère is clearly modelled on Kraus’s then-husband Sylvère Lotringer, the identity of “Dick” remained a subject of intense speculation within the art world until he was confirmed as the British academic and subculture theorist Dick Hebdige. The real-life Hebdige was famously repelled by the project, issuing a “Cease and Desist” letter through his lawyer and describing the novel as “beneath contempt” and a violation of his privacy.
Kraus, however, argued that the book did not invade his privacy because she had changed his physical appearance, personal history, and the titles of his books, and did not refer to any facts about his life that weren’t already published. For Kraus, “Dick” was never truly the subject of the book; he was merely a “motive” or a “motive for her to find her own voice”. The novel argues that the concept of male privacy being “sacrosanct” is often used as a tool to belittle or silence women’s accounts of their own experiences, effectively acting as an “omertà” that protects patriarchal structures.
Defining Autofiction: Etymology and Theoretical Origins
To understand why I Love Dick is categorised as autofiction rather than autobiography, it is essential to define the term and its complex theoretical origins. The neologism “autofiction” was coined by the French writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977. It first appeared on the back cover of his novel Fils, where he defined it as “Fiction, of strictly real events and facts; autofiction if you like”.
Doubrovsky’s invention of the term was a direct response to the “impossibility” of the traditional autobiography in the wake of psychoanalysis. He argued that because the self is largely inaccessible, fragmented, and filtered through the unconscious, any attempt to write about one’s life is inevitably a creative “adventure of language” rather than a simple recording of objective facts. For Doubrovsky, the term “fiction” did not refer to invention in the classic sense (making things up), but to the symbolic function of language and the process of putting experience into words.
The Technical Distinction: Autofiction vs. Autobiography
The distinction between these genres involves a fundamental shift in the “pact” between the author and the reader. Traditionally, the “autobiographical pact,” as theorised by Philippe Lejeune, relies on the author’s guarantee that the narrator, protagonist, and author are the same person and that the narrative adheres to factual truth.
| Feature | Autobiography | Memoir | Autofiction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Entire life, chronological account | Specific period, relationship, or event | Exploration of self and identity through narrative |
| Truth Claim | Assumed factual truth/historical document | Subjective truth/fidelity to memory | Intentional ambiguity; “literary truth” |
| Pact with Reader | Referential Pact: I will tell the truth | Memory Pact: I will tell what I remember | Ambiguous Pact: It is a novel, but it is me |
| Narrative Freedom | Limited by verifiable facts | Limited by personal perspective | High: uses invented scenes, dialogue, third-person |
| The “I” | Sovereign individual subject | Reflective, biased participant | Fragmented, performed, “narrativised” version of self |
In autofiction, the author often shares a name with the protagonist (the onomastic link), yet the work is explicitly subtitled as a “novel”. This creates a paradox: the text produces referentiality (it points to a real person) while simultaneously claiming the creative license of fiction. This ambiguity allows the author to “buffer” personal trauma through a fictional lens or to explore what events mean on an aesthetic and emotional level, rather than merely establishing what happened in a factual way.
Kraus herself has expressed ambivalence towards the term, preferring to describe her work as “non-fiction novels” or “reporting on experience”. She asserts that “there is no such thing as non-fiction” because the act of composition — selecting what to include and what to leave out — is fundamentally a creative act. Her approach focuses on “accuracy” and “humour” rather than “facticity,” using the self as a “case study” to uncover universal truths about desire, failure, and the social order.
Autotheory: The Embodiment of Critical Thought
A primary significance of Kraus’s work, particularly I Love Dick, is its role as a milestone in the development of “autotheory”. While the term was used by Stacey Young in 1997 and later popularised by Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts (2015), Kraus’s “ficto-criticism” provided the foundational model for this genre-bending practice.
Autotheory describes a mode of writing that integrates autobiography and other explicitly subjective modes with the discourses of philosophy, critical theory, and art criticism. It is a “dissident mode” that refuses the Enlightenment-era dichotomy between the “mind” (rational, objective, male) and the “body” (emotional, subjective, female).
The Pillars of Autotheoretical Practice
- Horizontal Knowledge: Autotheory seeks to create a sense of parallel, rather than hierarchy, between different ways of knowing. It strips the pretense of “neutrality” and “objectivity” from the theorising voice, acknowledging that theory is always “situated” within a specific historical, political, and bodily context.
- Embodiment: In autotheory, theorising is a “physically-embodied practice”. The author uses their own “panting, sweating physicality” and lived experience as the primary material for generating theory. For Kraus, this means that a discussion of the relationship between Jane Campion and Sally Potter is just as theoretically valid as a description of a sex act with Dick.
- The “Affective Turn”: Autotheory is part of a larger shift in cultural criticism that foregrounds “affect” (emotion and physical sensation) as a site of knowledge. It refuses the modernist tenet of “disinterestedness,” instead embracing transparent investment and emotional urgency as markers of critical rigour.
By equalising “the base and the theoretical,” Kraus’s use of autobiography challenges the expectations of how a female writer should write. She has drawn parallels between accusations of “obscenity” directed at male artists in the 1960s and the discomfort caused by “privacy” in contemporary female art. For Kraus, the willingness to use one’s life as primary material — and to view that experience at some remove — is a powerful act of assertion.
Socio-Cultural Reception: From Marginality to “Cult” Classic
The publication history of I Love Dick provides a fascinating insight into the evolving cultural reception of feminist life-writing. When first released by Semiotext(e) in the United States in 1997, the book faced a “critically and commercially cold” reception. It was frequently dismissed by the art world and the literati as “contemptible gossip” or a “salacious tell-all”. The gendered bias was evident; male critics seemed threatened by the book’s refusal to conform to generic expectations and its “unheroic” portrayal of heterosexual desire.
The 2015 UK “Furore” and Renewed Attention
It took nearly two decades for I Love Dick to reach its “apex” of influence. The 2015 UK reissue by Serpent’s Tail sparked a “furore,” with The Guardian and other major outlets hailing it as “the most important book about men and women written in the last century”. This sudden shift in reception can be attributed to several factors:
- The Rise of Modern Feminism: A new generation of feminist readers, who were “more inclined to get the joke,” embraced the book’s satirical and manifestic qualities.
- The Success of Autofiction: The global success of authors like Karl Ove Knausgaard (who was ironically credited by The New Yorker as being “invented” by Kraus) made the autofictional form more palatable to the mainstream.
- Influential Advocates: Contemporary writers such as Lena Dunham, Emily Gould, and Leslie Jamison became “fan-girls” of the book, bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.
Comparative Reception and Legacy Timeline
| Milestone | Context | Outcome/Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 1997 | Initial US Release | Cold reception; labelled as “gossip” and “secreted” writing |
| 2004 | Video Green | Established Kraus as a major critic of the LA MFA scene |
| 2008 | Mather Award | Professional recognition as a premier art critic |
| 2015 | First UK Edition | “Furore”; book reaches cult status and critical acclaim |
| 2016 | Guggenheim Fellow | High academic and cultural validation for her non-fiction |
| 2017 | Amazon TV Series | Mainstream exposure; Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon star |
| 2020s | Academic Study | I Love Dick becomes a foundational text for “Autotheory” |
The Amazon Prime television adaptation, directed by Joey Soloway, further cemented the book’s place in the cultural zeitgeist. While the show took significant creative liberties — setting the action in a “hipster” art community in Marfa, Texas, and expanding the cast of characters — it maintained the central narrative of the Chris-Sylvère-Dick triangle. The show was praised for its subversion of the “stalker” trope, affirming female erotic agency and the capacity of women to “lust deeply and inappropriately” over the male body.
Theoretical Roots: New Narrative and the French Tradition
The stylistic innovations of Chris Kraus are deeply rooted in two major intellectual movements: the American “New Narrative” and the “High Theory” associated with the French Nouveau Roman.
The New Narrative Movement
Originating in San Francisco in the late 1970s with writers like Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, the New Narrative movement sought to move toward a hybrid aesthetic that combined Language poetry with feminist and queer activism. Kraus has been a key proponent of this movement, which emphasizes:
- Text-Metatext: A story that constantly relates to and comments on itself from the present moment.
- The Public ‘I’: A rejection of the “neutral” or “objective” voice in favour of an “I” that is explicitly invested, emotional, and embodied.
- Gossip as Method: Using the personal, the social, and the “salacious” as primary material for artistic and theoretical exploration.
Kraus, along with authors like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles, used this aesthetic to challenge the “placid safe-thinking” of the contemporary literary establishment. Her work is characterized by “dazzling speed” and a “punk rock attitude,” weaving together historical biography, theory, and the diaristic into a “hyperintellectual, hypersexual” landscape.
The French Influence: Doubrovsky and Beyond
Kraus’s work is also a direct descendant of French autofiction and post-structuralist theory. She was influenced by the “onanistic” adventure of language found in Doubrovsky and the “double autobiography” experiments of other French writers. Like the French autofictionists of the 1970s, Kraus uses the “symbolic function of language” to demonstrate that the self is ultimately unknowable and always “just outside the reach of the written word”.
This French connection was facilitated by her husband, Sylvère Lotringer, who was instrumental in bringing thinkers like Baudrillard and Deleuze to the US through Semiotext(e). Kraus lived “immersed in this world of critical theory,” but because she was not an academic, she was able to blend this high-theory discourse with colloquial language and “street slang,” creating a uniquely accessible “high-low” approach.
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Writing the Self
The rise of autofiction and autotheory has prompted significant debate regarding the ethics of using real-life people as characters in a “case study.” Some readers find the premise of I Love Dick to be “mean” or a “perversion of liberation,” arguing that women violating others’ boundaries for art is no more radical than men doing the same.
However, the “autofiction hypothesis” suggests that these texts serve several vital functions:
- Dismantling the Master’s Tools: As Olivia Laing notes, the classical form of the novel is often insufficient to grapple with female experience. In Kraus’s hands, the novel “continually destroys itself,” enacting structurally the same refusal of constriction that the protagonist insists upon in her life.
- Self-Ethnography: Autofiction allows the author to act as a “reporter” viewing a strange culture — even if that culture is their own life. Kraus uses herself as a “case study” to uncover “universal truths” that feel closer to reality for other “weird girls” who don’t fit into pre-made theoretical categories.
- The Protection of Fiction: For some writers, the label “fiction” provides a “buffer” between the author and personal trauma, allowing them to explore painful memories with a degree of critical distance.
Kraus herself argues that the “sheer fact of women talking” in public is revolutionary precisely because it refuses to be “perfect” or “heroic”. By refusing to pretend to be perfect, female writers substitute the word “failure” with the word “human”.
The Enduring Legacy of Chris Kraus
The influence of Chris Kraus on contemporary literature is profound and far-reaching. She is credited with transforming art writing’s possibilities and inspiring a whole generation of writers to explore the “intergenre space” of creative non-fiction.
Influence on Contemporary Writers
| Author | Notable Work | Connection to Kraus |
|---|---|---|
| Sheila Heti | How Should a Person Be? | Direct descendant of Kraus’s challenge to the “serious” novel |
| Ben Lerner | Leaving the Atocha Station | Utilises the autofictional “I” to explore artistic failure |
| Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Paradigmatic work of autotheory influenced by “ficto-criticism” |
| Rachel Cusk | Outline Trilogy | Reinvents the autobiographical novel through the act of listening |
| Ocean Vuong | On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous | Blends memory and reflection with elements of fiction |
Kraus’s work continues to be relevant because it addresses eternal themes of “loneliness, failure, sexual politics, and the loneliness of globalization”. Her writing lays bare not only her own private life but the “unflinching clarity” of the patriarchal logic that minimizes female intellectual vivacity.
In conclusion, Chris Kraus has created a “new genre of writing altogether” — one that interweaves radical female subjectivity with analytical critique. I Love Dick stands as both a novel and “not a novel,” an exploration of the roles and dynamics between the sexes that uses the “immediacy of work” to invite the reader “smack-into-the-middle” of an unfolding life. Through the theoretical evolution of autofiction, Kraus has provided a “guiding light” for those seeking a more considered way to think, to write, and to be a person in the contemporary world. By making her problems “social,” she has indeed made the world more interesting.
Works cited
1. Chris Kraus | Official Publisher Page – Simon & Schuster, https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Chris-Kraus/235000240 2. Chris Kraus (writer) – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Kraus_(writer) 3. Chris Kraus – EGS – Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought, https://pact.egs.edu/biography/chris-kraus/ 4. Chris Kraus: An X-ray of ‘I Love Dick,’ the book of feminine sexual desire that has fascinated Rosalía (and generations of women before her) – El Pais in English, https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-02-23/an-x-ray-of-i-love-dick-the-book-of-feminine-sexual-desire-that-has-fascinated-rosalia-and-generations-of-women-before-her.html 5. Why everyone loves I Love Dick | OUPblog, https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/kraus-i-love-dick-creative-women/ 6. Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2019/07/autotheory-as-rebellion-on-research-embodiment-and-imagination-in-creative-nonfiction/ 7. Deconstructing Boundaries: Autotheory’s Feminist Legacy – DergiPark, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/4714269 8. CHRIS KRAUS | YU – Yale Union, https://yaleunion.org/chris-kraus/ 9. ‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/11/im-going-to-write-about-all-of-it-author-chris-kraus-on-success-drugs-and-i-love-dick 10. Performative Philosophy: The Films and writings of Chris Kraus and Semiotext(E), https://www.monash.edu/muma/exhibitions/previous/2011/performative-philosophy-the-films-and-writings-of-chris-kraus-and-semiotexte 11. Chris Kraus, https://www.novembermag.com/content/chris-kraus/ 12. Semiotext(e) – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotext(e) 13. Chris Kraus’ Literary Style (Fictional Value), https://fictionalvalue.com/chris-kraus 14. I Love Dick – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Dick 15. I Love Dick – Serpent’s Tail, https://serpentstail.com/work/i-love-dick/ 16. I Love Dick | The Point Magazine, https://thepointmag.com/criticism/i-love-dick/ 17. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus review – a cult feminist classic makes its UK debut, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/11/i-love-dick-chris-kraus-review 18. chris kraus: when classic turns cult | The Fifth Sense | i-D, https://thefifthsense-i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/chris-kraus-life-after-dick/ 19. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus | Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243991.I_Love_Dick 20. Chris Kraus: I Love Dick was written ‘in a delirium’ | Sydney writers’ festival | The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/30/chris-kraus-i-love-dick-was-written-in-a-delirium 21. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus – Triumph Of The Now, https://triumphofthenow.com/2018/12/01/i-love-dick-by-chris-kraus/ 22. The Revival of Chris Kraus and her Radical Novel ‘I Love Dick’ | Sleek Magazine, https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/chris-kraus-interview-i-love-dick/ 23. Dick’s Identity Isn’t Important To The Story In ‘I Love Dick’ – Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/p/is-dick-from-i-love-dick-based-on-a-real-person-the-story-is-so-much-bigger-than-his-identity-56663 24. 2.6 Autofiction – MADOC, https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/53455/1/10.1515_9783110279818-029.pdf 25. Autofiction: Writing Lives (Chapter 37) – The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-the-novel-in-french/autofiction-writing-lives/340A18567457E60C2E81540CBA171163 26. Autofiction | Research Starters – EBSCO, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/autofiction 27. Autofiction: The Forgotten Face of French Theory – Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, https://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/site_engleza/documente/documente/Arhiva/Word_and_text_2017/04_Dix.pdf 28. L’autofiction – EspaceFrancais.com, https://www.espacefrancais.com/autofiction/ 29. Autofiction | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, https://oxfordre.com/literature/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1339?p=emailAWySoi71Fd6hM&d=/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1339 30. The Authentic Blur: Navigating Memoir, Autofiction, and the Quest for Truth in Personal Narrative – The Original Writers Group, https://originalwritersgroup.co.uk/2025/07/07/the-authentic-blur-navigating-memoir-autofiction-and-the-quest-for-truth-in-personal-narrative/ 31. Introduction, https://moodle.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/moodle/pluginfile.php/691696/mod_pdfannotator/content/0/1_The_Story_of_Me_Contemporary_American_Autofiction_—-_%28Introduction%29.pdf?forcedownload=1 32. “Adolescence as Hallucination” and Eschewing Autofiction: A Conversation with Chris Kraus, https://therumpus.net/2026/01/15/adolescence-as-hallucination-and-eschewing-autofiction-a-conversation-with-chris-kraus/ 33. Chris Kraus – Nuda Paper, https://nudapaper.com/chris-kraus/ 34. Introduction: Autotheory Theory – DukeSpace, https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/bitstreams/0c450a9c-a16d-485c-828a-0cda17391475/download 35. Arianne Zwartjes, “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory” (6.1) – ASSAY, https://www.assayjournal.com/arianne-zwartjes8203-under-the-skin-an-exploration-of-autotheory-61.html 36. Auto-Theory as an Emerging Mode of Feminist Practice Across Media – YorkSpace, https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/items/42c9c333-5196-410d-bb8b-c9b2035456a6 37. A Calling of the Ancestors? Jill Soloway’s ‘I Love Dick’ – Another Gaze, https://www.anothergaze.com/a-calling-of-the-ancestors-jill-soloway-i-love-dick-amazon-prime-feminist-maya-deren-akerman-potter-campion-chris-kraus/ 38. After Auto/Biography: The Rise of New Autofiction and Rachel Cusk’s “Delegated Performances” – Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961656 39. I Love Dick: the book about relationships everyone should read | Women | The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/02/i-love-dick-sex-chris-kraus-men-women-book 40. The Rise of Autofiction: Blurring the Lines Between Fact and Fiction – tpsg. Publishing, https://tpsgpub.com/the-rise-of-autofiction-blurring-the-lines-between-fact-and-fiction/ 41. All Book Marks reviews for I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/i-love-dick/ 42. New Narrative | The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/new-narrative 43. Social Practices (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents) (Paperback) – Village Square Booksellers, https://www.villagesquarebooks.com/book/9781635900392 44. How We Read Autofiction – Ploughshares, https://pshares.org/blog/how-we-read-autofiction/
