Since its publication in 2015, much attention has been given to the genre-bending conventions of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a book that challenges traditional memoir by moving between daily life, philosophical reflection, and critical theory. Categorized on its back cover as “autotheory,” the book opens by introducing readers to Nelson, her lover, Wittgenstein, and the limits of language—all on its very first page. But as the papers collected for this special session suggest, the propulsion to center Nelson’s text as the central figure of contemporary autotheoretical writing can obscure just how extensive has been contemporary literature’s confrontation with the deconstructive ambitions of what has been nicknamed the linguistic turn. In fact, configured more expansively, autotheoretical writing is not only not transparently new, it is also neither theoretically nor formally coherent. Various authors—including J. M. Coetzee, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgard, Kathy Acker, Anne Garréta, Dodie Bellamy, and Chris Kraus—have been grappling with the challenge of writing about selves and personal life in ways that reveal a wide range of strategies for undermining the faulty assumption that the confessional pretense of autobiography is where life and writing comfortably meet. Kraus’s I Love Dick for instance takes up the epistolary form in order to write her way out of the fabrication of personal intimacy it performs while Knausgard engages with what Fredric Jameson calls “itemisation,” a mode of endless description that challenges not just narrative expectations but the novelesque temporality that accompanies the traditional autobiographical form.

The point here is that The Argonauts is a celebrated recent text that both inherits and advances longer conversations that connect contemporary literature to philosophy and theory. While all of the session contributors engage Nelson’s work, they crystalize different aspects of the intellectual legacies that inform it. Valerio Amoretti’s “Reading AutoFiction as Critique” takes the longest view as he reads Nelson’s work, along with Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, as part of the literary tradition of confession. As he tells it, the use of confession as the occasion for a fictional elaboration of one’s self-narrative has coexisted since Augustine with the use of confession as a platform for a critical examination of society. By reading texts as born of this dual tendency, Amoretti focuses on how their narrative forms adapt, mimic, or mock the motions of critical thinking even as they eschew the familiar rhetorical practices of critique—i.e. objectivity, argumentation, and the stability of the critiquing subject itself. The observation that these works emerged at the same time as a much-debated wave of “theory fatigue” swept over the humanities gives rise to Amoretti’s central question: how does the autofictional confessional subject affect the work of critique? Amoretti’s exploration turns to psychoanalysis to consider both the psychic life of the autofictional subject and the academic reader’s attachment to the critiquing subject in order to extend our understanding of the critical reach of autofictional writing altogether.

The second paper on the panel takes a decidedly different approach to The Argonauts and the critical inheritances that inform it, revealing the session’s aim to generate a polyvocal approach to self disclosure in contemporary writing. In “Critical Forms of Life: Theory, Sincerity, and the Self,” Clare argues for differentiating autofiction from autotheory in order to better account for the concerns that animate them. For Clare, the work of Heti, Coetzee, Knausgård, Ben Lerner and others is best understood as autofiction, as their texts challenge prevailing assumptions regarding the relationship between life and art by exploiting and exploding distinctions between fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography. But autotheory, he insists, while related, is conceptually different. Its practitioners follow Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, bell hooks, and others by incorporating critical theory’s terminologies and methodologies into the text’s composition, thereby transforming both the form and content of the work. Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, along with The Argonauts, all employ critical theory in ways that push the boundaries of both autobiography and theory. If, Clare argues, autofiction establishes what Adam Kelly calls a “new sincerity”, then autotheory’s sincerity lies in exposing a self that recognizes its contingency and social/linguistic constructedness without abandoning all attempts to grapple with lived experience. Unlike autofiction, autotheory renders the personal theoretical.

The final presentation by S. Brook Corfman turns directly to The Argonauts and its theorization of gender and genre as linked forms. Cast as a provocation, “Nelson, Preciado, and the Challenge of Somatopolitical Fiction” reads the memoir for its ability to reveal—or conceal—incompatibilities between theory and everyday life. The paper begins with the central conceit of Nelson’s book which doubles as a theory of the book’s form: the dream of the Argo, that ancient ship whose “parts may get replaced, but it’s still called the Argo.” For Corfman, this emphasis on material transformation in the name of remaining the same reveals a conservative, almost Platonic, understanding of the self. In contrast, Corfman reads Testo Junkie, which Nelson cites as the origin of the concept of autotheory, but whose own disavowal of memoir is cast at the outset as “a somatopolitical fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory.” Reading the disjunction between “self-theory” and “autotheory,” Corfman considers how Preciado’s approach might extend what Jeanne Vaccaro calls “non-predictive gender” into literary form, thereby refusing to settle the disruptions of both gender and genre in advance. It is this refusal, Corfman argues, that is the necessary ingredient for decomposing the literary, theoretical, and autobiographical conventions that are at the heart of the session’s discussion of current approaches to genre and its transgressions.

By featuring three presentations and no formal respondent, the session is organized for conversation, both among the presenters and between the presenters and the audience. MLA attendees who seek to follow current conversations about self disclosure, autobiography as creative fiction, and both the death of theory and its ongoing relevance will find “Self Disclosures: On Contemporary Literature and Critical Form” of particular interest.