Autofiction is defined by refusing character, plot, and narrative devices

Evidence

Among literati, immediacy as literary style goes more readily by the name “autofiction.” Auto is a Greek reflexive pronoun: self, same, of itself, independent, natural, not made. In English compounds, it usually means self-acting and spontaneous, as in “automatic.” The recently surging autofictions acquit as fictions that are not fictions, not made but just extant, exalting a presence preceding representation. As a rule, autofictions follow the fight plan Knausgaard outlines for eschewing the devices of fictification (character, plot, and narrative). Rather than building character, they advance a protagonist who is the same as the author in name and circumstance and real friends and real family and, above all, real voice. Rather than narrativity and plot, they purvey first-person present-tense uneventful short-spans, just elliptical ruminations in real time. Redacting fictional construction, duration, and figuration, autofiction delivers identity, instantaneity, it-ness. It moves “to get to the things in themselves.” Through these varying neutralizations of literary synthesis, autofictions put fictionality itself under erasure, crowning immediacy as writerly imperative for the moment. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core working definition: autofiction = protagonist identical to author plus first-person present-tense uneventful short spans; this is exactly the feature-naming the reader needs.
• XREF: The ‘etymology of auto as not-made/natural’ connects to the reader’s defense of mediation (artificial, made) as politically necessary.
• QUESTION: Pursue whether her claim that autofiction abandons duration/narrativity is falsifiable against e.g. Knausgaard’s actual multi-volume structure.