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  • Becoming Autotheory
  • Ralph Clare (bio)

the impact of the recent boom in what u.s. critics and publishers are increasingly calling autofiction is a notable, if curious, phenomenon. Authors such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk, as well as the wildly successful translations of works by Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante, have gained both readerly and critical accolades. In various ways, autofictional works collapse fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography into texts that, as Marjorie Worthington writes, "constantly play with readerly expectations about memoir and fiction, thwarting both and thereby forcing a recognition that … the line is at times rather permeable" (149). While something about these authors' works seems radically new, however, several critics have put this boom into historical and cultural perspective. Autofiction, it turns out, has a notable literary and historical lineage.1

Yet within this swath of autofiction, something truly new is emerging: autotheory. Autotheory constitutes something related to yet entirely distinct from autofiction. Whereas autofiction responds primarily to the post-postmodern literary scene and the rise of the anyperson memoir, autotheory responds more so to the institutionalization and the so-called death of theory. Whether educated or struggling to learn their art during the heyday of theory in the academy, the authors of autotheoretical texts incorporate critical theory's terminologies and methodologies into their work in order to transform both its form and content. Chris Kraus (b. 1955) and Maggie Nelson (b. 1973), for example, represent different generations of writers whose autotheoretical texts engage with theory's rise and supposed fall. Kraus's I Love Dick (1996) and Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) each employ critical theory to similar and different ends that nevertheless expand upon the possibilities of both autofiction and theory itself.

Taken together, these texts suggest that in autotheory, theory is not employed merely to deconstruct the self or fragment the "I," though [End Page 85] it may well do so, but to self-consciously and practically construct an ethical or sincere self in a critical manner. If much contemporary American autofiction aims to establish an honest or open dialogic with the reader (Sturgeon; Nicol 257), then autotheory's sincerity lies in the exposure of a vulnerable self that recognizes its contingency and social/linguistic constructedness while nevertheless insisting upon the "reality" and value of lived experience. Thus autotheory avoids the charge of essentialism that haunts identity politics by countering it with a notion of embodied experience that underscores the malleability of identity itself. In autotheory, then, it is not so much that the personal must become political, but that the personal must first become theoretical.

generation theory and the theory of exhaustion

In his mildly polemical "The Theory Generation," Nicholas Dames attempts to take stock of the effects of High or capital-T Theory on a recent generation of American writers who came of intellectual age in the 1980s or thereabouts, during the "the institutionalization of Theory" when "universities began to house and pay significant European thinkers at the moment their influence in their native lands began to wane" (162).2 According to Dames' reading of "more or less realist novel[s]" by Teju Cole, Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Lerner, Sam Lipsyte, and Jennifer Egan, Theory Novels are often ambivalent, ironic, or flat-out scathing in assessing the pedagogical and practical value of Theory. For the characters in (and by extension the authors of) such novels, Theory becomes "a seductive phase of education that is finally too cultish and self-enclosed to make sense of the world's upheavals" (161). The enlightenment that Theory inspires in its questioning of Enlightenment ideals brings, in the end, a disillusionment of its own. At the very least, it is "no longer the key to all the world's things, but rather just another thing-in-the-world" (163–64).

Like Dames, Mitchum Huelhs, in "The Post-Theory Theory Novel," reflects upon the institutionalization of theory and its implications for thinking about contemporary American literature (284). Yet whereas Dames, like the characters in the novels he reads, remains pessimistic about theory's place in literature or the world, Huehls, exploring not-so "realistic" novels (including works by Jeffrey Eugenides...

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