The genre system of English writing has recently been disrupted by the emergence of “autofiction”, generally understood as a hybrid of autobiographical and fictional narrative. Critics and commentators have sought to specify the nature of autofictional hybridization, and the set of texts to which the term might apply, yet without achieving much consensus. Because autofiction remains inchoate, and because it lies “between” fiction and nonfiction in ways that are as yet underspecified, we suggest that autofiction presents an interesting test case for commonly-employed genre classification methods in computational literary studies. We therefore contribute the first available quantitative, corpus-based examination of autofiction in English. Gathering 195 English-language works frequently described as autofiction(al) in various contexts, we explore the distinctiveness of these works relative to other kinds of contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Although with differing degrees of accuracy, we find that autofiction can be distinguished from fiction and nonfiction using most frequent words, LDA topics, and WordNet supersenses. We suggest that the word “autofiction” has been applied to a specific kind of contemporary writing–one in which not much happens to a small number of people. We further establish that autofiction can be identified via internal evidence, and not only via paratextual or extratextual factors.
Anthology of Computers and the Humanities · Volume 6
The event of autofiction in English: genre classification in an evolving literary system
