Abstract

Beginning with the trend toward first-person narrative perspectives in contemporary literature, this article examines the ways in which crisis-ridden presences are narrated in narratives of return. The focus is on how conversion narratives articulate a collectively shared experience of social change. Autosociobiographical novels open with a threshold narrative that follows the logic and structure of classic conversion narratives. The tripartite narrative structure of autobiographical conversion narratives, in which a turning point separates the life course into a wrong life before conversion and a right one after conversion, is used in the novels as a time-diagnostic tool to render a diffuse social threshold state representable.