The memoirization genre elevates individual lived experience over objective social analysis

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

• DEFINE: Defines ‘memoirization’ as a full catalog of features: first-person dominance, write-what-you-know, confessionalism, therapeutic narration, centering of the present.
• XREF: This catalog of immediacy features in fiction directly connects to the reader’s stated purpose of naming ‘immediacy’ aesthetic features and detecting them in real works. — connects to: Personal experience is the ground of liberatory feminist theorizing — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 151