Autotheory and Its Others

Abstract

Ever since Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts gave the word fresh currency a decade ago, autotheory has infiltrated scholarly, literary, and artistic practices. Autotheory and Its Others contributes to this nascent metacritical conversation. An inclusive discourse, autotheory embraces its uncanny double, allotheory, and, thus, this collection invites to the table a host of uncanny others: psychoanalysis, queer theory, and crip theory as well as art writing, postcriticism, and autofiction, among other genres and discourses.

Bringing together four editors and thirteen contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, this collection of critical and creative-critical essays grapples with what it means to couple the personal with the theoretical. The volume’s chapters feature geographical settings as far-flung as New Zealand, Iran, and Mississippi and its wide-ranging topics include anecdotal theory and dialogia–theoria, the bodymind and illness, artificial intelligence and experimentation, accident and fantasy, collages and fragments, unlearning and autopractices, unknowing and the unconscious, uncertainty and art writing, narcissus and trauma, kudzu and pedagogy, memory and legend, autofabulation and religion, and lo-fi critique and academia. Ultimately, Autotheory and Its Others showcases this emergent genre’s diversity while also charting its multivalent future directions.