Autofiction’s term evolved from 1970s play into earnest zeal for the real

Evidence

Since the word’s first usage in English in the New York Times in 1972 when Paul West began to refer to (and eventually write his own book of) “a mode of tethered autobiography, or autofiction, in which the thing of paramount importance is the presiding mind itself, which endures after the fiction collapses,” it has connoted a break with fiction that unleashes presence. The more commonly cited, though later, origin of the term was a joke ultimately deleted from the text of a book by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977: “Si j’ecris dans ma voiture mon autobiographie sera mon AUTO-FICTION” (If I write in my car my autobiography will be my autofiction). The book’s back cover inscribed the word in a tagline while omitting the joke: “fiction of strictly real events or facts; autofiction.” Autofiction’s route, amid a crisis of literary value, from joke and play toward the zeal of the real defines its historical development (not coincidentally in the epoch from 1972 to the present), an ever more explicit expressiveness nauseated by mediation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 123

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘irony rides ’70s waves, sincerity rules today’ trajectory maps onto her Antitheory chapter and the broader critique of postmodern irony—possible point of disagreement.
• CANDY: The deleted car-joke origin of ‘autofiction’ is a light, delightful piece of literary trivia—ideal small-talk material.