After Autofiction

“Autofiction was fun,” laments Lauren Oyler, in a 2018 review for the Baffler, “while it lasted, but a self-conscious movement based on the lives and reading lists of young urban artists was never going to break new ground; nor did it give the reader a reason to jump out of bed in the morning." As a form (or a genre – as Oyler points out in an extended essay on the subject, these terms are often used interchangeably, although she favours the former), autofiction first came into being almost fifty years ago, coined on the back cover of Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977) as “autobiography? No [...] fiction, of events and facts strictly real”, and yet it is a cluster of contemporary novelists who have grown to be more closely associated with the term. If, as Zadie Smith proposed in her influential 2008 essay, “Two Paths for the Novel”, fiction was then at a critical fork in the road, torn between following the familiar track of lyrical realism and an avant-garde, experimental anti-realism, by the mid-2010s it seemed both routes had wound their way to converge at the exact same spot: suddenly, it felt like everywhere, everyone, and everything was autofiction.

Taking this confluence as our starting point – the autofictional boom of the last decade, which brought with it novels by Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti,  and Tao Lin, amongst others – this seminar seeks to explore what has come in the wake of such a tradition. How has the mid-2010s turn towards autofiction inflected the contemporary literature we read now? Are writers like Tony Tulathimutte offering up a metafictional Rejection (2024) of autofiction's terms (his approach has been described as a kind of "anti-autofiction, fiction that basks in its falsity"), countering common misreadings of works by authors of colour: "If I’m gonna be associated with my characters," he writes, on the framing of his Asian-American protagonists as authorial stand-ins, "it’s going to be on my terms." Once its two paths were drawn together in the form of autofiction, did the novel, like a mobiüs strip – or rather, as Catherine Lacey might put it, The Mobiüs Book (2025) – begin to unravel, double back, fold in on itself? And has the new age of AI, post-truth politics, and influencer culture made autofiction, with all its emphasis on authentic selfhood, feel obsolete? Might there be, as Sheila Heti remarks in Alphabetical Diaries (2024), a way to follow many paths at once, because “a book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding."

We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Autofiction and contemporary “anti-autofiction”
• Autofiction and (in)authenticity
• Autoficion and the politics of race and representation
• New narrative strategies by authors of autofiction