Against Autofiction: Two Paths for the Internet Novel | Spike Art Magazine

Because of her “Lishian swerve,” just as soon as Heti makes a judgment in Alphabetical Diaries , it is undone, and then undone again, invoking the reader to interpretively assemble her sentences into a conceptual structure of their own from which they can derive meaning. This relationality between sentence fragments is too poetic to be reduced to t... See more

Why does the autofictional novel still dominate the database novel? One clear answer is that the former has the aura of celebrity, as well as its associated false intimacy. However, as we’ve learned, the latter has its own rhizomatic logic, one that scoffs at false binaries; of fascicular tyranny. It’s clear that the database novel can function wit... See more

Sasseen writes that “there is an immersive quality to the internet, the Wikipedia rabbit holes and the endless link trees, that the affectless writing that has become the house style of online life fails to capture... It’s in the sorting of the information, the understanding of how this information gets filtered into the very structures of our lang... See more

Whereas the autofictional narrator establishes an autocracy over the world they relate, like an influencer who won’t respond to their followers, the author of the database novel calls their own authority into question. This reduces the distance between reader and writer, the latter encouraging the former to pursue the rhizome that mutually links th... See more