In so doing, we ask: what does autotheory reveal about the kinds of socially supported assimilation, accommodation, resistance, and claim-staking involved in the act of learning? What does engagement with autotheory illuminate about how the self, at the threshold of meaning, comes to embody new epistemological ways of being? What, moreover, might autotheory teach us—scholars of different rank and experience--about pedagogy, and especially the learning enabled by reading and writing?
The best-known examples of autotheory, and those receiving the most critical attention, are works whose artistic production relies on citational, critical, philosophical, and/or poetical practices typically afforded only to the artistic and academic elite (Baxter and Auburn 2023). We, by contrast, explore how autotheory can be embodied and/or accessed by writer-readers outside these circles. Interrogating autotheory as praxis, we propose a newly inclusive vision of this genre’s pedagogical value and reach, both historically and in contemporary literary and writing classrooms.
Anne Ruggles Gere will begin with “Sarah Winnemucca: Word Warrior.” Winnemucca's 1883 Life among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims has been variously called an autobiography, a treatise on Indian rights, an introduction to Paiute culture, and an illustration of Indigenous textual performance. This book, the first published by a Native American woman, is all of these; it is also a text designed to educate EuroAmericans. Winnemucca was, among other things, a teacher. This paper proposes that autotheory offers a way to describe Life. This intersectional genre departs from the traditional narrative arc and, as Jen Soriano puts it, "moves through fragments and strands and strips, conveying multiple viewpoints to reject homogenous truth in favor or a more complex reality," as Winnemucca's writing does. Representing the perspective of Indigenous people being disenfranchised, Winnemucca aimed to educate her EuroAmerican readers and open a dialogue between Indians and EuroAmericans to interrupt the colonialist narrative and institute a more complex and inclusive lived experience—and the learning such experiences enable for both. An innovative teacher, Winnemucca also employed performance art, another dimension of autotheory. Her prose grew out of the over 400 lectures she gave on both the East and West coasts as she represented the plight of her people with costumes, dramatic accounts, tears, and vivid gestures.
Kyle Frisina’s talk, “Critics in Community: Autotheory’s Lessons for the Literature Classroom,” draws on the work of contemporary autotheorists to scaffold the posture of a critic in embodied relation to her peers. Inspired by the experience of returning to in-person learning after many semesters online, this paper confronts the challenge of introducing students to the emerging canon of autotheoretical literature: visceral and engaging stuff, to be sure, but often stylistically complex, politically charged, and rich with intertextual references that largely exceed students’ grasps. How can young scholars discuss such difficult material as a means of building up their confidence to write about it when they find equally difficult the notion of looking straight at one another? The answer locates in autotheory a theory of learning in which the relationship between embodied experience, the practice of writing, and engagement with other critical perspectives is not linear but always flowing in every direction at once.
Lizzie Hutton’s talk, “Autotheory and Literacy Learning: Autotheory for Beginners” explores the pedagogical benefits of writing autotheory. In many writing studies classrooms, especially those aimed at students’ exploring both the sponsors (Brandt) and literacy misconceptions (Wardle and Downs) that have shaped their reading-writing identities, literacy narratives and autoethnographies are often a staple assignment. This talk positions autotheory as a needful update to these genres, one that explicitly scaffolds writers into questioning the heroic individualism that underlies many default stories of literacy acquisition. Autotheory’s lens of theory helps writers complicate their understanding of themselves as literacy learners; just as important, however, autotheory’s lens of experience empowers them to challenge and “flesh out” (Wiegman) the lacunae in others’ explanations: places where present theory may still fall short.