The last two decades have seen a surge of interest in “auto” genres: “autotheory,” “autofiction,” “autoethnography,” and “self-writing.” A disparate group of writers - from Maggie Nelson, to Claudia Rankine, to Karl Ove Knausgaard - have emerged as practitioners of such genres, while scholarship has engaged with their longer histories and global circulation. This panel will explore the different forms of knowledge that turning toward the self has enabled, in works that cut across the aesthetic, sociological, psychoanalytic, and critical. Our panelists will ask why self-examination has counterintuitively served as a basis for understanding intersubjective relations, social collectives, or even digital and other post-human forms of memory. Why, in other words, do forms of knowledge that exceed or disavow the integrity of the individual subject return to subjectivity? This is especially surprising given the suspicion towards introspection as a valid means of (self-)knowledge expressed from the mid-20th century onwards by diverse disciplines including anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies. While in recent years special journal issues and panels have been devoted to several of the genres we’ve named, our panel wishes to comparatively examine their engagements with the “auto” and pursue a more careful distinction between these textual immersions in subjectivity. What kind of self does each represent? How have they drawn on social and intellectual movements such as psychoanalysis, feminism, antiracism, and queer theory? How have their histories intersected over the course of the long twentieth century?

Alex Brostoff (Kenyon College) will parse the reclamation of deformation in what Susan Stryker refers to as “a transgender aesthetic” in works of autotheory. Reading across a contemporary cluster of trans autotheories that echo Stryker’s seminal “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” (1993), this presentation proposes that the entwined transexualization and racialization of rage undo the ostensibly self-referential “auto” in autotheory. While the figure of the monster stalks the social order which identifies it as a deformation, social mutability remains contingent on the rage of its exclusions. At a moment when transgender rights and communities again come under threat, this talk tends to the trans aesthetics of autotheory, which take the discursive limits of gender and genre as its object and repudiate disciplinary mechanisms that dictate classification.

Taylor Johnston-Levy (Ben Gurion University) will explore what she terms posthuman subjectivity in the contemporary autofictional novel. Though the novel has long been the genre of everyday experience, a cohort of twenty-first-century novelists, including Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Knausgaard, has turned its attention to events so commonplace that, unless we happen to catch them on a smartphone photo, we might not remember them at all. For this reason, critics have understood their novels as an imitation of digital technology and its accompanying self-obsession. This presentation will propose, however, that autofiction questions the integrity of the individual in an age defined by technologies of memory.

Tori McCandless (University of California, Davis) will track the relays between histories of dialect poetry and sound recording technologies as they come to bear on autoethnography in the mid-20th century. Constellating Zora Neale Hurston’s recordings for the WPA Collections on Florida Folklife, Sterling Brown’s Southern Road (1932), and Margaret Walker’s For My People (1942), this presentation considers how the embodied voice, amplified through text and technology, counterintuitively used the self to leverage a critique against the privileging of individual and racialized subjectivities. This talk listens for the transmedial relationships between the auto of ethnography and the ways in which the self was used to re-represent collective subjectivities.

Yael Segalovitz (Ben Gurion University) will follow the surprising resort to the psychoanalytic genre of self-analysis by contemporary queer writers in the US, decades after psychoanalysis was declared “dead” in North-America. In such works as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (2000), Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Emma Lieber’s The Writing Cure (2020), self-analysis is hailed as a viable literary model, especially via Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). This unexpected dialogue might hint at a return in queer-feminist thought to Freud’s model of the monadic drive-oriented self. Instead, the presentation suggests that the writers above astutely identify in Freud's self-writing an intersubjective view of the subject, years before the emergence of the Object Relations School that centers intersubjectivity. This talk will sketch a link between Freud’s self-analysis, contemporary queer-feminist self-writing, and an intersubjective view of the self.

After a five-minute introduction to the topic, each panelist will speak for 12 minutes, followed by a 20-minute discussion period.