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What is Autofiction to the World
-an Academic Piece
While autofiction has only picked up in popularity since the 2010s, it has made a big boom in the literary world. The origin of autofiction seems to be elusive to even the most educated scholars, who can’t seem to pin it as no one can truly agree on when and where this genre was born. Some attribute it to France in the 1970s and others go as far back as the 1800s with authors who were not aware of what they were writing. “Autofiction has only become a discrete topic of anglophone scholarly attention over the past decade, during which time the first conferences, journals, and monographs devoted to the subject appeared.”(Bloom 2019) While many works of autofiction were written prior to this trend, people weren’t discussing and analyzing this incredible genre until recent years. Any articles that have been written about just what autofiction is usually were written from 2010 to now, 2022. Most articles use specific examples to further help their audience understand the foundation of autofiction. Reading an example is necessary to understanding the core of the genre as the definition of Autofiction is so undecided. It’s up to every reader and writer of autofiction to find the definition that speaks to them the most. Autofiction is the revolutionary genre it is because its complexities leave room for authors and readers alike to discover their own truths within the genre.
One Article, “Autofiction in English” by Aude Haffen, is its own literary review on the book “Autofiction in English” by Hywel Dix, published in 2018. The book, “Autofiction in English”, takes the French origins of the genre autofiction and translates it into a European context, meaning the “rules” of autofiction are attempted to be outlined according to a more European form of writing the genre. This attempt at outlining the true “rules” of autofiction is a theme across most works about the genre, whether they are scholarly or mainstream news articles. One writer from the New York Times, Jessica Winter, wrote an article about the effect of the introduction of autofiction in literary spaces. Winter comments on how most people assume that any work created by an author is a “thinly veiled autobiography” and how this in most cases is just false (Winter 2021). Myra Bloom's article on the subject, “Sources of the Self(ie): An Introduction to the Study of Autofiction in English”, also talks about the effects of the attention autofiction has cultivated within the last ten years. “The sudden awareness of autofiction within the academy arguably reflects the high profile it has come to occupy within popular literary culture” (Bloom 2019). Autofiction’s new popularity, while encouraging some to search for the core of the genre according to older works, has majorly encouraged modern writers to create their own version of the genre. In Bloom’s writing, they strongly encourage this new exploration and creation within the genre. Writers like Siddharth Srikanth approach the debate differently. Srikanth uses past autofiction works to break down the genre, one work being from 1987 and the other from 2009. From this method, Srikanth finds more individual truths about what autofiction means to the writer. “Once we identify a work as an autofiction… we expect that the author is ultimately communicating to us something of significance about her actual life experiences even if she uses fictive discourse repeatedly to do so” (Srikanth 2019).
Just like the scholars have discrepancies in the origin of autofiction, they can’t agree about what autofiction truly is at its core. Even the writers of the articles make a point to tell the reader that the definition of autoficition is elusive and that the definition they are about to provide is based on what personally resonated with them. Bloom states that autofiction is “notoriously difficult to define” because of its highly personal nature, while other scholars think more in black and white about it (Bloom 2019). “...whether the writer, narrator, and protagonist need to share the same name; whether the events recounted must be wholly, partially, or not at all true in the referential sense; what stylistic features are used to shape the narrative…” (Bloom 2019). Bloom makes it clear what characteristics of autofiction are still debated about, but this is a very basic definition in itself. The debate continues about what the core of autofiction is but most scholars have similar ideas to Bloom about how fiction is utilized within the genre.
As Srikanth says in “Fictionality and Autofiction'' 2019, “I argue the “fiction” of autofiction is necessarily a part of its pact with its audience; it is not that we are asked to read a narrative as simultaneously being fictional and nonfictional [...] but that we are asked to put off the question with the promise the narrative will use both fictionality and nonfictionality to reach some complex truths about the author and his or her world.” This genre is highly personalized so it can be something else to every reader and writer. The fiction and nonfiction aspects of the genre are tools used by the author to tell their story in a three dimensional way. You, the reader, have access to the events that took place (the plot), the setting and background (the imagery), and the emotions and the line of thought of the subject (the author). This larger range of vision into a scene is rare to come across in nonfiction and in life. Rarely do we get to experience something the exact same way as someone else and autofiction opens this door for its readers.
The use of fictionality in autofiction is what makes autofiction the revolutionary genre it is. Haffen states that the value of the use of fictionality in autofiction is “To be in search of self-narrative(s) otherwise hindered by the psychic effects of trauma or too marginal to follow preexisting narrative patterns” (Haffen 2020). The human experience is a hard concept to grasp and because of our flawed memory, it's very hard to communicate in a non-fictive way. This understanding of flawed memory allows for writers to write their own truth without worrying about having to be factually accurate. “Autofiction does not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, or fictive discourse and nonfictive discourse. Instead, writers of autofiction often deploy extensive fictionality in order to better illuminate actual life experiences.”(Srikanth 2019). Analyzing your own experiences enough to write about them in a confidently nonfiction way is nearly impossible and incredibly draining so writing with this freedom opens doors of opportunity for people with stories to tell.
“Autofiction is best conceptualized as a genre that deliberately troubles audience expectations regarding fiction and nonfiction for both autobiographical and novelistic ends.”(Srikanth 2019) Autofiction, while a relatively new genre, is a powerful one. Its unique ability to portray the human experience is why so many scholars are debating it now even after having existed for a while. The ever unanswered question of what the core of Autofiction is will continue to be debated as time goes on and as such, it’s up to the reader to find what the core of the genre is to them.
References:
Haffen A. (2020). Autofiction in English. Proquest. https://www.proquest.com/lion/docview/2574462516/fulltext/954E43E0B3A14A32PQ/1?accountid=8388
Bloom, M. (Mar-Jun 2019). Sources of the Selfie(s)- An Introduction to the Study of Autofiction. ProQuest. https://www.proquest.com/lion/docview/2510616942/2B835803EF674050PQ/1?accountid=8388&segment=LitCrit
Srikanth, S. (2019). Fictionality and Autofiction. Style.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743794
Winter, J. (2021). Our Autofiction Fixation: Essay. The New York Times (Online)
https://www.proquest.com/lion/docview/2500950664/43D4CA13242A4E2DPQ/4?accountid=8388