Serge Doubrovsky

Julien Doubrovsky was born on 22 May 1928 in Paris.[2][3] His father was a tailor and his mother was a secretary.[3] His family was Jewish; in 1943, in the midst of World War II, they fled Le Vésinet and hid with a cousin.[3]

Doubrovsky graduated from the École normale supérieure, and he earned the agrégation in English in 1949.[2][3] He subsequently earned a PhD in French Literature.[3]

Doubrovsky became a professor of French Literature at New York University in 1966.[3] He subsequently taught at Harvard University, Smith College, and Brandeis University.[2] He retired in 2010.[3]

Along with publishing seven volumes of autobiography, he was known as a critical theorist.[4] He coined the term 'autofiction', which has now entered the French dictionary.[4] Doubrovsky's autofiction, while a literary sensation in the academic world, had unfortunate real-life consequences. While he was living in New York, teaching at New York University and writing chapter after of chapter of a barely-fictionalized account of his marriage and extra-marital sex life, his young Austrian wife, Ilse, was living in a fetid studio apartment in the outer-reaches of Paris. As Doubrovsky wrote his manuscript, he would mail each chapter to Ilse. Upon reading the last chapter, recounts the magazine Causeur in 2017, she killed herself.https://www.pressreader.com/france/causeur/20170613/281887298291315

Doubrovsky resided in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.[5] He died on 23 March 2017 in Boulogne-Billancourt .[2][5]

• Le jour S, 1963.
• Corneille et la Dialectique du héros, 1963.
• Pourquoi la nouvelle critique : critique et objectivité, 1966.
• La Dispersion, 1969.
• La place de la madeleine : écriture et fantasme chez Proust, Mercure de France 1974.
• Fils, 1977.
• Parcours critique, 1980.
• Un amour de soi, 1982.
• La vie l'instant, 1985.
• Autobiographiques : de Corneille à Sartre, 1988.
• Le livre brisé, 1989.
• L'après-vivre 1994.
• Laissé pour conte, 1999.
• Parcours critique 2, 2006
• Un homme de passage, 2011.