Sonja Trurnit

Sonja Trurnit received a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from the LMU Munich and University of Alberta. She graduated from the LMU Munich with a master’s degree in English Studies, focusing solely on the study of literature, in 2022. Her master’s thesis focused on the queer textuality of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992). Since fall of 2022, Sonja has held a position as research assistant at the English Department at LMU to pursue her doctoral studies and has joined the research training group "Family Matters" shortly after.

Thesis topic: "Going into Labour: Procreativity in Contemporary Life Writing and Autofiction”

This dissertation examines the emergence of the mothering memoir and autofiction as a distinct literary genre that has flourished since the early twenty-first century. While the recent boom in maternal writing has been widely discussed from sociological and political perspectives, this project offers a literary and theoretical analysis. It asks how these texts transform experiences of motherhood into experiments in form, authorship, and genre. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories of the semiotic, abjection, and maternal creativity, the dissertation explores how writing from the position of the mother reshapes ideas of creativity, influence, and literary production itself.

At the centre of the study is the concept of procreativity, coined by Susan Stanford Friedman to describe the intersection of procreation and creativity. Through close readings of works by Rachel Cusk, Doris Lessing, Jenny Diski, Maggie Nelson, Elif Shafak, and Sheila Heti, I argue that mother-writers engage in a dual labour – birthing both children and texts – and that this duality generates a unique aesthetic. Across these works, recurring tropes of ambivalence, genealogy, and writer’s block become not signs of creative paralysis but expressions of literary renewal.

By tracing a literary lineage that extends from Virginia Woolf through Lessing to contemporary writers, the project develops the idea of a maternal genealogy of influence, revising canonical models such as Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and Gilbert and Gubar’s “anxiety of authorship”. Ultimately, the dissertation shows how contemporary mothering memoirs and autofictions, read through Kristeva, transform writer’s block into literary procreativity and constitute themselves as a genre defined by their own maternal lineages. In doing so, the project reclaims maternal writing as a site of formal innovation and creative power within contemporary literature.