autofiction

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a hybrid literary form that blurs the boundary between autobiography and fiction, in which the author uses their own name for the protagonist and draws directly on their own life experiences while employing fictional techniques of invention, compression, rearrangement, and imaginative embellishment; the term was coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 to describe his novel Fils, which used his own name and life while insisting on its fictional status, and has become one of the most discussed modes in contemporary world literature; autofiction raises fundamental questions about the ethics of representing real people and events in fictional forms, the reliability and authority of autobiographical memory, and the extent to which the self can be known and narrated; key practitioners include Karl Ove Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Annie Ernaux — whose autofictional work earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature — and Ben Lerner, each of whom uses self-exposure as a means of exploring broader cultural and philosophical questions