Scholars largely see autofiction as an old novelistic propensity, not a new form.

Evidence

The 2021 MLA Panel “Contemporary Autofiction,” for example, presented an introduction and four papers, and all save one were unanimous in situating autofiction as an inherent propensity of the novel that was especially wielded in the ’70s. Ralph Clare, Tim Bewes, Annabel Kim, and Ellen Lee McCallum were in agreement; only Lee Konstantinou maintained that there was a specificity to the twenty-first-century autofictional project. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 497

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reader wants to judge whether autofiction is genuinely new — this consensus position is the counter-claim she must fight or adopt. Worth chasing Konstantinou’s dissenting position.