Mediated Identities: Autofiction, Dialogical Self, and the Heterophenomenological Subject in Cusk’s Outline Trilogy and Levy’s Living Autobiography

This article reads Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014-2018) and Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography (2013-2021) to argue that autofiction is a practice through which an author observes the self from outside and treats the relations in which it is situated as data. Two frameworks work together in this reading. Daniel Dennett’s heterophenomenology supplies the stance: first-person reports are taken as material for third-person interpretation. Hubert Hermans’s Dialogical Self Theory complements this stance by describing the structure of what is observed: a self composed of dialogic relations among I-positions and organised from a meta-position. The article proposes the term mediated identity for the autofictional narrator who gives this meta-position a textual form, standing between the biographical author and the fictional character. Cusk and Levy’s trilogies show that the autofictional narrator-protagonist constitutes a mediated identity that organises Hermans’s dialogic context while enabling the integration of fact and fiction. While the autobiographical narrators filter context through an already-formed self, this mediated identity treats context as structural material out of which the narrator’s self is constructed. The article first establishes this conceptual framework and autofiction’s mediating function, then analyses Cusk’s Outline and Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogies, finally comparing their distinct uses of autofiction.