Contemporary fiction has been memoirized into first-person presentism

Evidence

By “memoirization,” we can connote the new dominance of first-person narration, but also the imprint of the imperative “Write what you know”; elevation of the individual subject’s lived experience to literary treatment; a mistrust of authority untethered from experience; the filtering of social and historical dynamics through subjective lenses (or the active discrediting of objective lenses); the promotion of phenomenology as limit horizon for knowledge; the enterprise of confessionalism; preoccupation with domesticity (whether childhood or marriage); a torquing of the novel’s fascination with orphans into an obsession with parental blame; the individual’s heroic overcoming of circumstance; therapeutic narrativization of political, social, and corporeal challenges; a centering of the historical present; solemn solicitation of readerly recognition, identification, and empathy; a populism of the masses poised against an alleged elitism of the literati. Fiction less and less purveys the third person, less and less works through plots, less and less spans long time scales, and more and more resembles the personalist, presentist wallowing already for sale in the other aisles. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 159

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This is the chapter’s core definition of ‘memoirization’ — precisely the kind of named aesthetic-feature inventory the reader needs.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, comprehensive catalog of memoirization’s component features that constitutes the chapter’s load-bearing theoretical move, worth sitting with and testing against specific works.

Related

• The memoirization genre elevates individual lived experience over objective social analysis (similarity 0.95)
• Contemporary realism shifts from personalized content to personalized narrative frame (similarity 0.85)
• Contemporary fiction evicts third-person narration through privatized perspective (similarity 0.84)
• Twenty-first-century autofiction deletes fictionality and shrinks pronouns to the first person (similarity 0.81)
• Memoir’s dominance expresses immediacy’s antifictional turn toward owned autobiographical voice as property (similarity 0.80)
• Fiction’s absorption of memoir and self-branding erases fictionality (similarity 0.78)