ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a comparative reading of a transatlantic flow of ideas and literary forms. The genre I explore has been variously called confessional, personal, narrative, or autobiographical criticism; autocritography; or autocritique. My transnational approach to American literature will focus on the critical, “autobiografictional” texts Rooms of Our Own (2006) by American professor and critic Susan Gubar, Negotiating With the Dead (2002) by Canadian writer and poet Margaret Atwood, and La loca de la casa (2003) by Spanish writer and literary journalist Rosa Montero. I will thus establish a dialogue between three texts that were produced in different parts of the world but within a time span of only four years (2002 to 2006) Moreover, I will explore the feminist, transatlantic dialogue between Gubar’s Rooms of Our Own and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of my Own. My comparative analysis tries to prove that this genre, a renewed kind of belletrism, downplays previous claims of quasi-scientific theoretical research and reasserts the distinctive value of the literary: in the US, but also in Canada and in Europe.
