Autotheory as a Twenty-First-Century Literary Practice
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in scholarly writing that blends academic criticism with autobiographical writing, most prominently in the field of American literary and cultural studies. Undermining traditional conventions of scholarly writing through stylistic and formal innovation, these works—such as Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and, most prominently, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts—have come to be referred to as “autotheory.” Probing a wide range of critical and creative modes of writing that interweave subjective experience with theoretical inquiry, autotheory has evolved from a marginalized intersectional feminist practice into an increasingly popular method of writing over the past two decades. Having of late attracted the interest of a range of publishers in scholarly and mainstream literary contexts, autotheory has also come to be referred to as a hybrid genre bringing together autobiography and academic writing. So far, research on autotheory has predominantly traced autotheory’s genealogical and theoretical origins. Within the specific context of the twenty-first century, however, scarce attention has been paid to the characteristics that define autotheory as a literary practice and its potential status as a genre. Combining literary studies and book studies, this dissertation project specifically situates autotheory within contemporary dynamics of literary production by focusing on the university and the publishing industry as literary ecosystems. This project thereby aims to analyze both the aesthetic and institutional practices that are constitutive of autotheory as a literary practice, in doing so examining the question in how far autotheory consolidates as a genre of the present. In this light, this project addresses timely questions about the politics of theoretical knowledge production as well as understandings of genre shaped by current developments within the literary field.
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Silvia Schultermandl