Memoir’s dominance expresses immediacy’s antifictional turn toward owned autobiographical voice as property

Evidence

Along with the complexities of self-incorporation and the unprecedented predominance of the first person in the contemporary novel, literary immediacy’s antifictional exudation streams from the present paramountcy of memoir. The New York Times now calls memoir “the dominant genre of contemporary literature” and has receipts: in the first decade of the new millennium, memoirs often accounted for as much as 80 percent of their bestseller list, and twenty-first-century memoir sales increased 400 percent from the twentieth-century average. This generic hegemony is overtly thematized in the best-selling memoir of all time, Michelle Obama’s 2018 Becoming, whose 14 million copies promise that anyone can capitalize on their life: “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.” In this image of ownership, the charismatic voice that embeds immediatist self-expression substantializes as content—a shiny, unique, self-begotten property. The composite of a voice and its property now offers itself as the real stuff exuding directly through any language, not only in the specifically taggable genre of memoir but in intellectual production at large. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 155

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does the Becoming quote really function as immediacy propaganda, or is Obama’s memoir an exception that complicates the paradigm? Worth interrogating.
• XREF: Directly actionable evidence for the reader’s project of naming immediacy’s features (first-person predominance, genre collapse) in real works; syncs with the Antitheory chapter debate.