surfiction means A style of fiction that rejects realism and advertises its own fictional status, similar to metafiction, postmodernism or fabulation. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 88 out of 100.
Why “surfiction” is a great word
SURFICTION — [Noun] A radical literary practice that programmatically abandons any pretense of mirroring reality, insisting instead on its own status as an arbitrary and artificial construction. Coined in 1973 by Raymond Federman in his manifesto "Surfiction—A Position", from the prefix sur- (over, above, beyond) + fiction. Unlike "realism," which seeks the comforting lie of verisimilitude, or the broad category of "metafiction," which may merely acknowledge its own fictiveness, surfiction is a deliberate, architectural assault on narrative convention. It is the sound of a narrator disputing his own typed words, the sight of a chapter collapsing into a diagram of its own plotlines, and the feel of a plot dissolving into typographical chaos—a literature that builds its ruin in plain sight to prove that shelter was always an illusion.
Etymology
Coined by Raymond Federman in his 1973 manifesto "Surfiction—A Position".
noun
- A style of fiction that rejects realism and advertises its own fictional status, similar to metafiction, postmodernism or fabulation.“...it was of a piece with a broader postwar codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of what came to be called "surfiction" or, more durably, "metafiction."”