This session will present new work by scholars at a range of professional stages—graduate student, assistant professor, and full professor—on autotheory and autofiction. This special session topic is timely, coinciding with growing recognition of the cultural significance of these genres, even as it also aligns with the increasing variety of scholarly approaches to autotheory and autofiction as hybrid forms. Combining literary critical approaches with those of critical race and ethnic studies as well as theater and performance studies, our panel raises an interrelated set of aesthetic, narratological, historical, philosophical, and ethical questions about subjectivity, relationality, and reality as represented within these signal genres of the twenty-first century.
To date, scholars have described autotheory and autofiction as artistic modes of performing theory and theorizing experience (e.g. Fournier 2021); as feminist practices, particularly for emphasizing the thick reality of lived experience and minoritized perspectives (e.g. Wiegman 2020); and as genres best understood through its relational dimensions (Brostoff and Cooppan 2024, Laubender 2020, and Frisina 2020). Too often, however, the genres are discussed in siloed ways from one another—or, just as problematically, as interchangeable. Eager to mine the junctures and disjunctures between the two genres with respect to our panel’s core interests, we also seek to engage our audience in debating fruitful new directions for the continuation of our work.
To promote discussion, we have selected three panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers. Following our talks, panelists will propose questions to each other and to the audience so that a rich discussion may ensue. We will begin with “The Theatricality of Contemporary Autotheory” by Kyle C. Frisina. This paper explores minoritarian autotheory through the lens of its theatricality—in addition to but not subsumed under the more critically ubiquitous concept of its performativity. Frisina argues that while autotheory is often typically either extolled or decried for its purported intimacy and immediacy, autotheory by minoritarian writers is in fact vastly skeptical of both notions. Instead, minoritarian autotheorists promote a form of relationality familiar to us from the theater: an embodied negotiation of identification amidst separation and difference. Indeed, texts such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, this paper’s primary case study, advocate for a relationality that centers hallmark dynamics of theater: embodiment, contingency, duration, and repetition.
With a similar emphasis on the ethical importance of repetition, Jessica Page takes up the autofictional work of Rachel Cusk in “Echoes, Revisions, and Variations: Seriality in Rachel Cusk’s Autofiction.” Drawing on archival research into Cusk’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center, she argues that Cusk’s evolution from novelist and memoirist into an autofiction writer represents a specific ethical project grounded in seriality. Cusk’s notes and early drafts of the Outline trilogy, as well as other works such as Medea (2015), propose a mode of serial return which complicates the narratives of departure that form the thematic backbone of the trilogy. If the reality of a “complete” autobiographical or fictional narrative proves a fallacy to Cusk, patterns of repetition and revision in the Outline trilogy may represent, for the author, a more truthful form of life writing.
Finally, Jenny Rademacher discusses three contemporary Spanish and Latin American authors in “Experiments in Hybrid Life Narratives: What Does it Mean to Be “Real” in Today’s World?” Rather than undermining confidence in the value of facts and historical reality, these works offer potential antidotes to the “post-truth” era by critically examining what and how we claim to know—particularly with respect to the socially embedded self. Mexican writer Enrigue’s Sudden Death, Now I Surrender and I Dreamed of Empires defy traditional life writing, historical, and novelistic boundaries, merging historical scholarship with ludic speculation, examining how the world that ostensibly birthed modernity continues to influence the present. Gabriela Ybarra’s The Dinner Guest combines deep examination into her grandfather’s murder at the hands of separatists in Northern Spain with the sudden loss of her mother to cancer, using documentary details and spectral imaginaries to link and question these two buried histories. And finally, José Ovejero’s While We Are Dead combines autofiction, memoir, and novelistic play in ways that illustrate the subversive and allusive risks to losses of empathy, human connection, and trust in contemporary life.