It is easy to see that the question of realism continues to be relevant in debates on contemporary Brazilian literature. In an article from the Folha de São Paulo newspaper on February 23, 2014, “Notícias da literatura brasileira do século XXI” (News about twenty-first-century Brazilian literature), a representative group of professors, researchers and literary critics face the question of the main tendency in contemporary literature with impressively different responses. The editor of Ilustríssima, Marco Rodrigo Almeida, proposes substituting Machado de Assis's idea of a “national instinct,” which helped to characterize nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, with a “subjective instinct” as a magnifying glass of the main tendencies of the new century. Thus, the idea would be that, in contemporary literature, the national perspective as a fundamental question has been replaced not only by a subjective and autobiographical tendency, but also by a social realism with an autofictional approach in which a certain subjective perspective repositions the boundaries between the social and the individual, on the one hand, and between experience and referentiality, on the other.

It seems as though the argument raised by Ilustríssima in defending the importance of the term “autofiction” in current literary production, strongly questioned and refuted by most critics, ends up suggesting that the fictionalization of individual experience once again authorizes the literary treatment of historical experience in a manner supported by testimonial literature. If the testimonial initially defined a literature of the Holocaust, political repression and the periphery, today, its perspective is reproduced in a kind of subjective chronicle of everyday reality. We will not discuss, now, the problems with this shift nor assess the critical divide on this idea, but only observe that, at the same time that one insists on the relevance of autofictional writing, it seems that its intrinsic argument is based on the premise of a realism that, as a continuous backdrop, would offer legitimacy to the literary. To refer to realism implies the view that the justification for literature is found outside of it, if not in historical and social experience, then in the staging of individual and subjective experience.