Joyce Solved the Autofiction 'Problem'

The autofiction war seems to me to be rooted not so much in any particular sentiment towards autofiction itself as in an existential fear about the future of literature. It’s not so much a discussion of the merits of the “genre” (which so few of the debaters bother to read anyways) as it is a question of what sort of novel can even survive into the near future: can literary fiction reclaim its status as a lively and significant part of the culture or have we reached a post-literacy world where new novels are culturally irrelevant and all we can do is rehash the old and scapegoat MFAs? Autofiction is the stand-in for the lifeless and isolated world of literary fiction that, to many, seems incapable of producing anything that people actually read.