Problems in Literary Study: Autotheory

Hailed as a new genre of contemporary writing, "autotheory" is widely described as an encounter between the philosophical discourses of critical theory and the affective and embodied terrain of lived experience. In some assessments, the genre's theoretical bite comes from the performative capacity of the autobiographical to evoke the intimacy of everyday life, while in others autotheory is embroiled, sometimes uncritically, in the fiction of self-knowing that grounds modern personhood. This course assembles an archive of literature, art, media, and theory to consider both the contemporaneity of autotheory and its historical inheritances.