ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 11.2 (Spring 2025)
    • 11.2 Articles >
      • Megan Brown, “Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative: The Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation" (Assay 11.2)
      • Amy Cook, "Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose" (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Conversations >
      • Thomas Larson, "The Reader's Mental Ear" (Assay 11.2)
      • Patrick Madden, "An Open Letter to My Late Friend Brian Doyle" (Assay 11.2)
      • Rhonda Waterhouse, "Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry” (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Pedagogy >
      • Becky Blake and Matthew J. Butler, "Avoiding Empathy Fatigue: What CNF Educators Can Learn from an Oncologist" (Assay 11.2)
      • Kelly Myers and Bruce Ballenger, "Essayism in the Age of AI" (Assay 11.2)
      • Marco Wilkinson, "Exquisite Copse" (Assay 11.2)
  • Archives
    • Journal Index >
      • Author Index
      • Subject Index
    • 1.1 (Fall 2014) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 1.1 Articles >
        • Sarah Heston, "Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes" (1.1)
        • Andy Harper, "The Joke's On Me: The Role of Self-Deprecating Humor in Personal Narrative" (1.1)
        • Ned Stuckey-French, "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" (1.1)
        • Brian Nerney, "John McCarten’s ‘Irish Sketches’: ​The New Yorker’s ‘Other Ireland’ in the Early Years of the Troubles, 1968-1974" (1.1)
        • Wendy Fontaine, "Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir" (1.1)
        • Scott Russell Morris, "The Idle Hours of Charles Doss, or ​The Essay As Freedom and Leisure" (1.1)
      • 1.1 Conversations >
        • Donald Morrill, "An Industrious Enchantment" (1.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Amazon Constellations" (1.1)
        • Derek Hinckley, "Fun Home: Change and Tradition in Graphic Memoir" (1.1)
        • Interview with Melanie Hoffert
        • Interview with Kelly Daniels
      • 1.1 Pedagogy >
        • Robert Brooke, "Teaching: 'Rhetoric: The Essay'" (1.1)
        • Richard Louth, "In Brief: Autobiography and Life Writing" (1.1)
    • 1.2 (Spring 2015) >
      • 1.2 Articles >
        • Kelly Harwood, "Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders' 'Under the Influence'" (1.2)
        • Diana Wilson, "Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that Bind the Lyric Essay" (1.2)
        • Randy Fertel, "A Taste For Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation" (1.2)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Why the Worst Trips are the Best: The Comic Travails of Geoffrey Wolff & Jonathan Franzen" (1.2)
        • Ingrid Sagor, "What Lies Beside Gold" (1.2)
        • Catherine K. Buni, "Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction—and Destruction—in Creative Nonfiction" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Conversations >
        • Doug Carlson, "Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner: Two Memoirs Go Cubistic" (1.2)
        • Patrick Madden, "Aliased Essayists" (1.2)
        • Beth Slattery, "Hello to All That" (1.2)
        • Interview with Michael Martone (1.2)
      • Spotlight >
        • Richard Louth, "The New Orleans Writing Marathon and the Writing World" (1.2)
        • Kelly Lock-McMillen, "Journey to the Center of a Writer's Block" (1.2)
        • Jeff Grinvalds, "Bringing It Back Home: The NOWM in My Classroom" (1.2)
        • Susan Martens, "Finding My Nonfiction Pedagogy Muse at the NOWM" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Steven Church, "The Blue Guide Project: Fresno" (1.2)
        • Stephanie Vanderslice, "From Wordstar to the Blogosphere and Beyond: ​A Digital Literacy and Teaching Narrative (Epiphany Included)" (1.2)
        • Jessica McCaughey, "That Snow Simply Didn’t Fall: How (and Why) to Frame the Personal Essay as a Critical Inquiry into Memory in the First-Year Writing Classroom" (1.2)
    • 2.1 (Fall 2015) >
      • Editor's Note2.1
      • 2.1 Articles >
        • Daniel Nester, "Straddling the Working Class Memoir" (2.1)
        • Sarah M. Wells, "The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: ​Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth" (2.1)
        • Chris Harding Thornton, "Ted Kooser's "Hands": On Amobae, Empathy, and Poetic Prose" (2.1)
        • Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna, "The Essay in Parts" (2.1)
        • Megan Culhane Galbraith, "Animals as Aperture: How Three Essayists Use Animals to Convey Meaning and Emotion" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Conversations >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character" (2.1)
        • Tim Bascom, "As I See It: Art and the Personal Essay" (2.1)
        • Adrian Koesters, "Because I Said So: Language Creation in Memoir" (2.1)
        • Interview with Simmons Buntin (2.1)
        • Mike Puican, "Narrative Disruption in Memoir" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Pedagogy >
        • Bernice M. Olivas, "Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition" (2.1)
        • Ioanna Opidee, "Essaying Tragedy" (2.1)
        • Crystal N. Fodrey, "Teaching CNF Writing to College Students: A Snapshot of CNF Pedagogical Scholarship" (2.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Teaching Adventure, Exploration and Risk" (2.1)
        • Christian Exoo & Sydney Fallon, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of Sexual Assault to ​First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (2.1)
    • Special Conference Issue
    • 2.2 (Spring 2016) >
      • 2.2 Articles >
        • Micah McCrary, "A Legacy of Whiteness: Reading and Teaching Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land" (2.2)
        • Marco Wilkinson, "Self-Speaking World" (2.2)
        • Miles Harvey, "We Are All Travel Writers, We Are All Blind" (2.2)
        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
        • Lawrence Evan Dotson, "Persona in Progression: ​A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Conversations >
        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
        • William Bradley, "On the Pleasure of Hazlitt" (2.2)
        • Jie Liu, "​'Thirteen Canada Geese': On the Video Essay" (2.2)
        • Stacy Murison, "​Memoir as Sympathy: Our Desire to be Understood" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Pedagogy >
        • Stephanie Guedet, "​Feeling Human Again: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Empathy" (2.2)
        • DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, "Exhibiting Speculation in Nonfiction: Teaching 'What He Took'" (2.2)
        • Gail Folkins, "Straight from the Source: ​Primary Research and the Personality Profile" (2.2)
    • 3.1 (Fall 2016) >
      • 3.1 Articles >
        • Chelsey Clammer, "Discovering the (W)hole Story: On Fragments, Narrative, and Identity in the Embodied Essay" (3.1)
        • Sarah Einstein, "'The Self-ish Genre': Questions of Authorial Selfhood and Ethics in ​First Person Creative Nonfiction" (3.1)
        • Elizabeth Paul, "​Seeing in Embraces" (3.1)
        • Jennifer M. Dean, "Sentiment, Not Sentimentality" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Conversations >
        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "'Did I Miss a Key Point?': ​A Study of Repetition in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights" (3.1)
        • Julija Sukys, "In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil" (3.1)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "​The Great American Potluck Party" (3.1)
        • Jenny Spinner, "​The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Pedagogy >
        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "​James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son" (3.1)
        • Christian Exoo, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of ​Intimate Partner Violence to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (3.1)
        • John Proctor, "Teachin’ BAE: A New Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought" (3.1)
        • Richard Gilbert, "Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' and ​Jonathan Lethem's 'The Beards'" (3.1)
        • Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt, "The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy" (3.1)
    • 3.2 (Spring 2017) >
      • 3.2 Articles >
        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
        • Creighton Nicholas Brown, "Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis" (3.2)
        • Nicola Waldron, "Containing the Chaos: On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir" (3.2)
        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
        • Joey Franklin, "Facts into Truths: Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in ​Creative Nonfiction" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Conversations >
        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
        • Amanda Ake, "Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person"​ (3.2)
        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Pedagogy >
        • D. Shane Combs, "Go Craft Yourself: Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through ​J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down” (3.2)
        • Michael Ranellone, "Brothers, Keepers, Students: John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison" (3.2)
        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
        • Megan Brown, "The Beautiful Struggle: ​Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses" (3.2)
    • 4.1 (Fall 2017) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 4.1 Articles >
        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
        • Harriet Hustis, ""The Only Survival, The Only Meaning": ​The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima"
      • 4.1 Conversations >
        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
        • Steven Harvey, "​From 'Leap'"
        • J. Drew Lanham, "​On 'Joyas Voladoras'"
        • Patrick Madden, "On 'His Last Game'"
        • Ana Maria Spagna, "On 'How We Wrestle is Who We Are'"
      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
        • Amy E. Robillard, "Children Die No Matter How Hard We Try: What the Personal Essay Teaches Us About Reading"
    • 4.2 (Spring 2018) >
      • 4.2 Articles >
        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
        • Corinna Cook, "Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire"
        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
        • Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: ​The Power of the Sentence to Transform"
        • Keri Stevenson, "Partnership, Not Dominion: ​Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir"
      • 4.2 Conversations >
        • Interview with Jericho Parms (4.2)
        • "Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors"
        • Amy Monticello, "The New Greek Chorus: Collective Characters in Creative Nonfiction"
        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
      • 4.2 Pedagogy >
        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "In Other Words" (4.2)
    • 5.1 (Fall 2018) >
      • 5.1 Articles >
        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, ""The World is Not Vague": Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact" (5.1)
        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Jen Soriano, "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Conversations >
        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
        • John Proctor, "Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression" (5.1)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
6.1

Picture

Arianne Zwartjes
​

Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory



“Theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin.” — Sara Ahmed 
​
I remember once, in graduate school, being floored when I heard one of my professors say, “I wanted to learn about X, so I proposed a class this semester focusing on it.” The idea that you didn’t already have to possess absolute Authority on a topic—that you could explore it through your preparations and then explore it even more deeply in reading and conversation together with your students—was both astonishing and exciting. Such a horizontal approach to knowledge and scholarly authority is mirrored in the contemporary field of autotheory, which seeks to explore, test, and converse with theory through investigations of the lived-body experience. This year I offered two classes on autotheory, as much to investigate the topic myself as to posit any kind of expertise. My students and I read texts by Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand, Paul Preciado and Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and Ann Cvetkovich; we tried to gather our thoughts about our own bodies of work and the themes and theory that might unite them, and wrote short pieces experimenting with the mixture of citation and narrative that autotheory invites. Over and over, we asked: what is autotheory? What does it do? What [new] things does it offer us? 

​
This essay seeks to share some of the answers we found to those questions, looking at definitions of autotheory as well as its historical roots; looking closely at aspects of a few autotheoretical texts including Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu; and exploring elements of theory and embodiment, innovation and assessment, multiplicity and rupture in the contemporary field of autotheory as part of the broader genre of creative nonfiction.


​Definitions

Autotheory is work that engages in thinking about the self, the body, and the particularities and peculiarities of one’s lived experiences, as processed through or juxtaposed against theory—or as the basis for theoretical thinking. It strips the pretension of neutrality, of objectivity, away from the theorizing voice. Often discursive, it offers us a thought-provoking, multivalent kind of hybridity, one unafraid to mix theory with creativity and lyricism, and with the graphic details of one’s very specific physical experience. Lauren Fournier, whose dissertation investigates autotheory, defines it as “contemporary works of literature, art, and art-writing that integrate autobiography and other explicitly subjective and embodied modes with discourses of philosophy and theory in ways that transgress genre conventions and disciplinary boundaries” (“Autotheory”). The term was used, if not coined, by Stacey Young in a chapter of her 1997 Changing the Wor(L)D: Discourse, Politics, and Feminist Movement, where she investigates writing that attempts “to counter discourses that homogenize ‘women,’ and that reify the concerns and strategies of relatively privileged women, with other discourses that center on the experiences and perspectives of women traditionally marginalized on the grounds of race, class, ethnic or religious background, sexuality, physical ability, and so forth” (61). Young labels the genre of those counter-discourses autotheoretical, and notes that such texts—a hybrid of theory and autobiography—are documentation of a kind of “discursive political activism” which is critically intersectional and feminist.

While interest in the contemporary field of autotheory has been growing over the past ten years, attention toward the term increased significantly with the 2015 publication of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which bore the descriptor autotheory on its book jacket. Yet there is little published commentary or explanation of what autotheory actually is, particularly outside of scholarly work, leaving those who are interested in it to delve deep or read between the lines, piecing together bits from recent articles and interviews with Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, and others. A number of recent works fall into the realm of autotheory; Claudia Rankine, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, Hilton Als, Brian Blanchfield, Saidiya Hartman, Alison Bechdel, Eve Sedgewick, Cristina Crosby, and Ann Boyer belong on the growing list of authors, along with those named above in this essay’s introduction.

​Among the things autotheory offers us that are “new”—or are of particular resonance at this moment in time—are its quick movement back and forth between different modalities of thinking and examining the world; the way it creates a sense of parallel, rather than of hierarchy, between different ways of knowing, thinking, and analyzing; and lastly, its innovative formal and structural contributions to the creative writing field as it navigates these multiple modalities.
__________
​When I first began exploring the subject of autotheory, I wondered how this combination of theory and autobiography differed from the feminist mantra the personal is political—or if in fact it did. Through my research and readings, and via Young and others’ thinking, I have come to understand autotheory as highly intersectional, and rooted in a long history of work, especially work by Black feminists and other women of color. Honoring this history requires us to look at least as far back as the writing and performance art of Gloria Anzaldua, Adrian Piper, Audre Lorde, Ana Mendieta, Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, and on and on, as well as the work of white queer feminists such as Mab Segrest and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Many of these writers and artists were doing overtly autotheoretical work, while others laid a foundation for more explicitly autotheoretical work to come.

​Autotheory is also connected to multiple other fields of academic study: in a recent call for papers, Margeaux Feldman and Philip Sayers point to the importance of  “understand[ing] autotheory in a social context” and as situated in or connected to other academic fields, including French theory, Black Studies, New Narrative—and, I would add, Postcolonial Studies and Queer Theory.  
 
As such, it is critical to avoid ahistoricism in our approach to the contemporary field of autotheory, and it is of particular importance to acknowledge the immense contributions of Black women and other women of color to this genre, in a moment where several of the autotheoretical texts receiving a great deal of popular attention—such as The Argonauts and I Love Dick—are by white authors. 
__________
​Naming, itself, is often a highly fraught activity of claiming, defining, narrowing, and at times excluding. Speaking of the trendiness of the term autofiction in a recent Paris Review conversation with Chris Kraus, Olivia Laing asks, “Why, anyway, do people feel such a need to pin things down in terms of genre?” While I have often shared Laing’s frustration with our apparent need to cram writing into labeled, boxed-in genres, and I understand her reticence about the drive to name, to “pin down,”  it is also a part of our reality that to give something a name is to give it visibility; to be able to think of something as in a category allows us to think about and probe the edges of that category, its functions and its politics, what new things it might offer us (while at the same time, of course, being a double-edged sword: to make visible by grouping something means those boundaries can also then be policed or become restrictive). It provides a context and a paradigm for work to exist within, both in ways that may help legitimize the work where needed, but also that allow us to find it and to examine it alongside other conceptually-similar work.

While the most literal definition of autotheory is work which explicitly combines autobiographical material with theory, there are of course many gradations and variances in how this actually manifests within different projects. Because we were not particularly interested in policing autotheory’s borders, my students and I found it useful to instead use both narrow and broader working-definitions as we examined various projects through the lens of autotheory. We came to speak of “little-umbrella” autotheory—that most-literal definition which explicitly weaves together physically-embodied autobiographical material with theory, as in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, or Sharpe’s In the Wake—and “big-umbrella” autotheory, which includes, in the words of Sally Keith, “personal narratives that are woven together with philosophy, psychology, criticism,” and other fields of knowledge, thus loosening the definition and broadening beyond just theory. There were projects, we felt, that used “softer strokes” in bringing theory or other disciplines into their work, and then there was, as with any territory, a gradual fade into shades of grey around the edges of what might be called autotheoretical or autotheory-related work.

​Lastly, it is worth noting that autotheory as a practice is certainly not limited to the medium of writing; in Fournier’s words, “there is something especially performative and art-world-related about autotheory as it has taken shape in recent years, and it is here where my research into autotheory as a trans-medial mode of feminist practice enters the picture” (“Artist’s Video”). As one example, Fournier curated “Autotheory,” a screening program with work by numerous filmmakers for Vtape in May 2018. 


​Theory

​A friend recently told me about a class she taught early in her career, on the poetry of witness: the students were feeling overwhelmed by the amount of trauma in the readings, they weren’t connecting, and another colleague said, “You’ve got to give them some theory so they have some tools to contextualize it, to understand it.” As human beings, we are deeply hardwired for story—it’s how we make meaning—and in this instance we could think of theory as another kind of a story: a narrative that makes sense of things. We might then define theory, more broadly, as ways of defining & explaining our experience to ourselves—but also, perhaps, generalizing our experience as a potentially-shared (though not universal) phenomenon: turning it into a category, something that can be articulated and defined.

Historically this articulation has been couched in bodiless and emotionless “objective” voice, and one of the powers of autotheory is to move beyond that pretense of objectivity which “theorizes without pragmatic connection to materiality or to empirical knowledge” (Blau DuPlessis 22). The opposite of such objectivity, Blau DuPlessis notes, is “not subjective but implicated . . . and intersubjective.” Autotheory’s move to bring autobiographical material together with the theoretical realm fits into the larger context of the affective turn in cultural criticism over the past several decades. In Depression: A Public Feeling—an autotheoretical text that in part explores this affective turn—Ann Cvetkovich writes, “I tend to use affect in a generic sense . . . as a category that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling, and that includes impulses [and] desires” (4). She notes that “at this point, theory and affect are not polarized or at odds with one another,” and clarifies that the Public Feelings project of which she has been a part “operates from the conviction that affective investment can be a starting point for theoretical insight and that theoretical insight does not deaden or flatten affective experience” (10). 

This is born out in multiple autotheoretical projects. In Testo Junkie, for example, Paul B. Preciado writes, “I’m not interested in my emotions. . . in their individual aspects,” but rather in how they intersect and overlap with the emotions and experiences of others (11). Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts of her “interest in the personal made public” (60), and her work is—as one of my students observed—rhizomal and multi-nodal in its thinking. Through her recurrent thread referring to Barthes’ commentary on the ship The Argo, Nelson explores both the construction of an object’s meaning, and the subjectivity of self within a larger political context. “Nelson is good at talking about theory to you as though you understand it, until you do,” says one friend. “It’s not personal. . . ​but it’s also not universal.” There’s that place in the middle that theory can speak to: the particularities of experience, shared by at least some grouping of human animals.

​In many ways, autotheory engenders collectivist, rather than individualist, worldviews; it uses theory to recognize the power of shared connection, shared experience, in a fragmented and isolated time. In one discussion, a student commented that, after a “century of the self, using the self as the measure of all things,” autotheory could be seen as “a reaching back out, not just exalting the cleverness of theory or the lure of confessional work, but trying to establish connectivity, to cast a net instead of glorifying the self.”  Or, as Young has put it: 
[Autotheoretical texts, which] combine autobiography with theoretical reflection and with the authors’ insistence on situating themselves within histories of oppression and resistance . . . undermine the traditional autobiographical impulse to depict a life as unique and individual. Instead, they present the lives they chronicle as deeply enmeshed in other lives, and in history, in power relations that operate on multiple levels simultaneously. (69)
​Autotheory thus explores and interrogates both the subjective construction of self, and self’s positionality within a larger context of power and politics. It is, in short, “invested in collective liberation” (Borst). 


Body

​In “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,” Kathy Acker writes,
​Bodybuilding is about failure because bodybuilding, body growth and shaping, occurs in the face of . . . the body’s inexorable movement toward its final failure, toward death.  . . . For this reason, a bodybuilder’s language is reduced to a minimal, even a closed, set of nouns and to numerical repetition, to one of the simplest of language games. Let us name this language game, the language of the body. (23)
​There is an important emphasis on body in autotheory, on bringing physicality and embodied experience into the writing, in dialogue with the theoretical or other academic material. It is no accident that this form has been so important for women—especially women of color—and nonbinary writers, Black writers, queer writers, and others with intersectional identities that have shaped their voices (often as “outsiders” in this institutionalized writing world).  And there is a certain rebelliousness to working in the realm of autotheory: an assertive disregard of genre, category, boundary; a willingness to take on established fields of theoretical work and to say, we are body as much as we are brain. As such, autotheory could be seen as a methodology, a way of using bodily experience to gather knowledge. Acker continues, “By trying to control, to shape, my body through the calculated tools and methods of bodybuilding, and time and again, in following these methods, failing to do so, I am able to meet that which cannot be finally controlled and known: the body” (26). Autotheory argues, the physical and graphic details of my embodied life are just as important, just as ‘high-minded’ or elevated, as this theory I will hold up side-by-side. Autotheory says too: all theory is in fact based in someone else’s experience of their one particular body, though they have conveniently erased it from their theorizing and from their writing so as to seem like a disembodied brain, a neutral voice. In the words of Adrienne Rich: “When I write ‘the body’ I see nothing in particular. To write ‘my body’ plunges me into lived experience, particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me . . . To say ‘the body’ lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say ‘my body’ reduces the tendency to grandiose assertions” (215).

There is immense political power here, in electing to show the frailties and fallibilities of the body, the mundane details of a life, in conjunction with the thinking—because, like social media’s perfect curation of a smiling happy life, and the social anxieties it creates, theory has long been a perfect, elite curation of the finest moments of the function of a brain, while hiding all the real lived experience of one particular set of causes and conditions which created that brain’s patterns of thinking—thus both disingenuously disguising the origins of the theorizing, but also creating an exclusive facade that tells those outsidered by academia, you can’t do this kind of work. 

​Autotheory steps in and intentionally contaminates all that theoretical purity with the messy, the wet, the dank of the hidden: of sex and of body. To come back once more to Acker:  
In our culture, we simultaneously fetishize and disdain the athlete, a worker in the body. For we still live under the sign of Descartes. This sign is also the sign of patriarchy. As long as we continue to regard the body, that which is subject to change, chance, and death, as disgusting and inimical, so long shall we continue to regard our own selves as dangerous others. (27)
​So one question we might ask of autotheory: What does it mean to write not only in but through the body? 


​Form

​If autotheory is a way to put body back into the story—to hold it up beside brain, and to say these things are not separate (even the scientific field is becoming more and more aware that there no split between body and mind, and some science literature now uses the term bodymind to emphasize this point)—then what we have in the field of autotheory are not only works which manifest that conceptual melding of brain and body, but also texts that are formally or structurally mimetic of such commingling in other modes. These are texts that are often intergenre or hybrid, multi-media as well as interdisciplinary; they are texts that, in the words of Casey Charles, lend themselves “to generic disruptions” as they “question the fixity of categorical boundaries” in both creative work and theory.

Several of the texts mentioned in this essay, for example, are multimedia and use photography or drawings alongside text. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is divided into four parts (The Wake, The Ship, The Hold, and The Weather) and offers “a theory and a praxis of Black being in diaspora” (18); the black-and-white photographs she includes throughout range from photos of her own family, to photos of art and events she includes in her analysis. Testo Junkie, which alternates between chapters of personal narrative about physical transition as a “gender hacker,” and chapters of quite dense theory about the pharmacopornagraphic era in which we live, includes a smattering of hand-drawn sketches such as a diagram of the chemical structure of testosterone, and an outline-style diagram of “endocrino-politics” (55, 57, 218). In Depression: A Public Feeling, Cvetkovich’s memoir section is visibly distinguished by the use of grey paper, while the analytical sections are printed on white; she includes a selection of color photographs of art by Sheila Pepe and Allyson Mitchell, as well as numerous black-and-white photos of other art.

​And some autotheoretical works—such as Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu, where she takes familiar structures such as end-notes and the dedication page and writes central content of her book into them—go beyond the implied dualism of hybridity to what could be called free form, a form which is “absent of fixed structures, such as jazz or free verse poetry” (Reid 140)—or which, in Kapil’s case, takes known forms and stretches them, distorts them almost beyond recognition. 
__________
​A question that is often raised with such projects—projects which transgress categorical boundaries of discipline, genre, and medium—is the question of assessment. In her introduction to American Hybrid, a 2009 anthology of poetry and poetics, Cole Swenson suggests that “decentralizing influences. . . make it harder to achieve a consensual judgement or even to maintain critical criteria” and that rather, we must become stronger, more engaged readers: capable of innovating new criteria at the same pace of innovation we see in the creative field (xxv). One of the challenges autotheory presents us with is that the reader must be always engaged and always thinking. There is no safety in an external authority of theory or form.

Very often, however, these projects teach us—even explicitly, as in Brand, Sharpe, and Preciado’s projects—how to read them, how to understand what they are up to: their conceptual project. Dionne Brand writes, for example, “So far I’ve collected these fragments. . . disparate and sometimes only related by sound or intuition, vision or aesthetic. I have not visited the Door of No Return, but by relying on random shards of history and unwritten memoir of descendants of those who passed through it, including me, I am constructing a map of the region, paying attention to faces, to the unknowable, to unintended acts of returning, to impressions of doorways. . . .What interests me primarily is probing the Door of No Return as consciousness.” (19, 25)  Preciado, too, instructs us in how to read his project, early on: “This book is not a memoir. This book is a testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol. . . ​A body-essay. Fiction, actually. If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, or a self-theory.” (11)

​One of the ways Sharpe teaches us how to read her project is through her use of keywords. “Significantly popularized by Raymond Williams as a way of making Marxist concepts more readily accessible for cultural analysis” (Cvetkovich 12), the keyword practice lends itself especially well to the realm of autotheory: it involves utilizing a central word—a keyword—with multiple connotations, “a word that is capable of bearing interlocking, yet sometimes contradictory and commonly contested contemporary meanings” (“What is a ‘Keyword’”) as the gathering premise of a project. Sharpe takes the word wake in its various and ranging meanings, harnessing its multiplicity—“keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening and consciousness”—and pairs wake with work “in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic. . . . wake work as a theory and praxis of the wake,” toward imagining “new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives” (18). Connecting these conceptual principles to her own life, after offering a section of personal narrative early on Sharpe writes, “I include the personal here to connect the social forces on a specific, particular family’s being in the wake to those of all Black people in the wake . . . I include the personal here in order to position this work, and myself, in and of the wake” (8). Thus wake and wake work become gathering principles of her autotheoretical work, but also concepts which are slippery, which can shift and morph throughout her project, are not overly defined or pinned down, and which can thus “contain multitudes.”


​Multiplicity

​Autotheory offers us a kind of chimera: work that is interdiscipline and, at its best, critically intersectional. It offers both subversion and transcendence of the boundaries around identity, around genre, around discipline and ways of knowing.  The literary world has not always been—and too-often still is not—so open-minded. As Jenny Boully writes in “On the EEO Genre Sheet,”
​It seems to me that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary racism. . . The term “other” also immediately connotes an agenda: if you don’t fit into one of our predetermined categories, well, then, you aren’t playing the game correctly. You are an other. You will always be an other. . . . To be told to choose is to be told that you disrupt the neat notion of where things belong, that you don’t belong.  
​In contrast, the field of autotheory allows not only for a multiplicity of form, of innovation, of medium, but also a multiplicity of experience, of perspective and embodied subjectivity. As Raili Marling argues, works of autotheory “are autobiographical texts that simultaneously interrogate theoretical issues and, by their genre liminality, seek to articulate otherwise muted phenomena.”

​Take Bhanu Kapil’s project in Ban en Banlieu, for example: a series of performance notes, installations, and errors, all revolving around a seemingly semi-autobiographical embodiment she calls Ban. Kapil at one point describes her project in this way: 
Notes for a novel never written: a novel of the race riot: (Ban). As my contribution to a panel at the limits of the poetic project—its capacity: for embodiment, for figuration, for what happens to bodies when we link them to the time of the event, which is to say—unlived time, the part of time that can never belong to us—I would like to present: a list of the errors I made as a poet engaging a novel-shaped space. (20)
​This is an autotheoretical endeavor that truly metabolizes the theory, makes it praxis in the creative act itself, and then documents that creative act in the writing; it is “a way to make visible something that was ‘no longer possible to say’” (Kapil 11)—a muted phenomena.

Kapil later says to Laynie Brown in an interview: “Syntax has the capacity to be subversive, to be very beautiful, to register an anti-colonial position: in this respect. I think of the semi-colon: how it faces backwards and is hooked, the very thing a content [shredded plastic] might be caught on. . . . Perhaps the poet’s novel is a form that, in this sense, might be taken up [is] by writers of color, queer writers, writers who are thinking about the body in these other ways.” Here we might substitute autotheory for poet’s novel—in this context, the project is similar: a disruption of the expectations of a given genre and mode of thinking, of representation. 

​Kapil’s work in Ban en Banlieu enacts the project of autotheory not through explicit commentary but through praxis—both in terms of its structure and syntax, and also in the sense that her project in Ban en Banlieu is not restricted to the page, but involved actual embodiment and performance rather than a single-moded commentary about the body.  


​Rupture

Is there a way in which autotheory can actually be inherently anti-feminist, one of my students asked, in that it seeks the through-line of outside expertise, outside authority, to justify its own thinking?

Memoir, as a form, has historically been both feminized and disparaged, and writing with any element of the personal by a female or nonbinary author is very likely to be lumped into that category (though, as Cvetkovich notes, “Given how widespread the use of memoir is among this generation of feminists, it’s surprising that debate continues about its value as a critical mode” (75)). Autotheory, as my student pointed out, offers a way to be able to use some of that “personal” material, but to “raise it to another level where it may be better received.” So in that sense, one could look at autotheory as a response to an external and problematic system—but does it, by its response, in some way validate or uphold that system?

​This question can be broadened beyond the lens of feminism: as one example, Sharpe describes the actual damage done to particular identities and communities by the racial failings and distortions of traditional theorizing: 
For Black academics to produce legible work in the academy often means adhering to research methods that are ‘drafted into the service of a larger destructive force’ (Saunders), thereby doing violence to our own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise. . . we are often disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation . . . We must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching; new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery. (13)
Taking one more step back to regard the entire field of autotheory, we could ask: Does autotheory function in similar ways to what Jen Soriano calls “intersectional form,” in her important essay “Multiplicity from the Margins”? Or does it, in fact, function in an opposite and opposed manner by invoking white/Western, institutionalized norms of intellectualizing at all? Soriano describes intersectional form as being “characterized by writing in which authors write their intersectional identities, experiences and perspectives onto the page.” She notes that “in the face of a dominant society that is largely non-intersectional and silencing, these authors create a new location that allows for such telling,” a voicing of identities and experiences that have previously, in the words of Kimberlé Crenshaw, “been relegated . . . to a location that resists telling” (as qtd in Soriano). The ensuing writing involves space, silences, and fracture; it “breaks away from the confines of traditional narrative arc and instead moves through fragments and strands and strips, conveying multiple viewpoints to reject homogenous truth in favor of a more complex reality” (Soriano).

Describing her project in In the Wake, for example, Christina Sharpe writes, “I am trying to find the language for this work, find the form for this work. Language and form fracture more every day” (19). Sharpe thus furthers the idea that intersectional form must by necessity include not only the plurality of voice and perspective, but also the sites where what must be said breaks apart, into the unspeakable or unsayable and then back again. Soriano concludes, “by bucking expectations of singular topic, narrative arc, and conclusive truth, intersectional form resists convention not just for the sake of experimentation, but for the sake of conveying and even modeling new ways of being in the world.”  (Or, in Sharpe’s words, “I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.” (18)) While I would not argue that all or even most autotheory is necessarily operating in intersectional form, the two clearly share some terrain in the larger hybrid field, and overlap in important ways, both pushing against convention for the sake of conveying and even modeling new ways of being in the world—and, I would add, modelling the value of new ways of thinking and knowing.

​Thus, another question we might ask of autotheory: What does it look like to “metabolize” concepts directly out of one’s lived experience, rather than internalizing externally-developed concepts or constructs which may in fact be damaging to the sense of self? Or, in Sharpe’s conception of “theorizing through inhabitation”: how do we take these metabolized concepts—these new ways of knowing—and “live them in and as consciousness”?


Closing Thoughts

​We live in an era where our modes of learning have largely become spatial and associative rather than linear. In this sense, that the multimedia aspects of autotheory are invitational and appealing is little surprise; as someone observed in our class discussion, “Every art form is moved forward by the available technology—we’re used to reading things online, and we now want that kind of hybridity and synthesis in books, as well.” As the creative nonfiction field opens itself to a broader range of form and approach, it becomes more and more evident that readers have an appetite for this kind of hybrid or multimedia work.

When my students and I asked, Why now? of autotheory—why this groundswell now, why the interest in this type of work?—they noted that it feels very much of this time: the digital age, with its competing talking heads, alternate realities, and disinformation; the quickly-changing world, constantly confronting us with things that are outside our preexisting boxes, and pushing us to adapt. This is a moment that can feel very bewildering, in many ways, and in a sense autotheory offers to bring us back to the concrete, back to lived personal truths—but it also does something to help us expand those preexisting boxes, which may contribute to the real hunger we are seeing for this kind of work.

Autotheory makes a space for conversation more complex than the quick reactivity of this moment often allows for, a space on the page for a kind of thinking most of us have less and less time for; and in particular, space on the page for questioning the authority of theory, while at the same time bringing body, physicality, and lived experience directly into the dialogue—especially critical to those of us who live in bodies or identities that have historically been marginalized, silenced, or ignored by the direct linearity of mainstream narrative.

​As Fournier writes, “I approach auto-theory as a practice of performing, embodying, enacting, processing, metabolizing, and reiterating philosophy, theory, and art criticism. . . as an often self-reflexive and performative practice in the post-medial present.” (“Autotheory,” emphasis mine) In this sense, autotheory offers us the space to both embody and process conceptual ideas; and the name for, the categorical possibility of, a body of work produced in that process of metabolizing.


​
I am indebted to the thinking, questioning, and discussions I’ve participated in with my students in autotheory courses at both the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Bend Workshops for Writers this year; many of their thoughts & ideas have directly influenced my own thinking, and made their way into this essay.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Picture
Arianne Zwartjes teaches for the Sierra Nevada College low-residency MFA program, and has also taught at the University of Arizona and the United World College. In her other life she has worked as a wilderness-medicine instructor, an EMT, an outdoor educator, and a carpenter. She is the author of the lyric nonfiction, medical-humanities book Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy, and the prose-poetry collection The Surfacing of Excess. Her writing won the 2011 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, was a Best American Essays Notable Essay, and has appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Visit her and her writing at www.ariannezwartjes.com. 



Related Works

Sarah Heston
Critical Memoir:
A Recovery from Codes
1.1 Articles

Jen Soriano
Multiplicity from the Margins:
The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form
5.1 Articles
Nicola Waldron
Containing the Chaos:
On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir
3.2 Articles


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      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
      • 8.2 Pedagogy >
        • Liesel Hamilton, "How I Wish I’d Taught Frederick Douglass: An Examination of the Books and Conversations We Have in Classrooms" (8.2)
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "In the Room Where it Happens: Accessibility, Equity, and the Creative Writing Classroom" (8.2)
        • Daniel Nester, "Joan Didion and Aldous Huxley’s Three Poles" (8.2)
    • 9.1 (Fall 2022) >
      • 9.1 Articles >
        • Mark Houston, "Riding Out of Abstraction: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Re-materialization of ​Social Justice Rhetoric in “The Sacred and the Superfund”" (9.1)
        • Ryan McIlvain, ""You Get to Decide What to Worship but Not What's Good": Rereading 'This Is Water'" (9.1)
        • Quincy Gray McMichael, "Laboring toward Leisure: The Characterization of Work in ​Maine’s Back-to-the-Land Memoirs" (9.1)
        • Aggie Stewart, "Bringing Dark Events to Light: ​Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative" (9.1)
        • Emma Winsor Wood, "A Lovely Woman Tapers Off into a Fish: Monstrosity in Montaigne’s Essais" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Conversations >
        • Philip Newman Lawton, "Rousseau's Wandering Mind" (9.1)
        • Claire Salinda, "Bodily Dissociation as a Female Coping Mechanism in ​The Shapeless Unease, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Girlhood" (9.1)
        • Hannah White, "“Which sounds bad and maybe was”: A Study of Narrative in Beth Nguyen’s “Apparent”" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jessica Handler, "Your Turn" (9.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Expressing Anger as a Positive Choice" (9.1)
        • Kozbi Simmons, "Literacy as Emancipation" (9.1)
        • Wally Suphap, "Writing and Teaching the Polemic" (9.1)
    • 9.2 (Spring 2023) >
      • 9.2 Articles >
        • Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Amy Mackin, "A Structural History of American Public Health Narratives: Rereading Priscilla Wald’s Contagious and Nancy Tomes’ Gospel of Germs amidst a 21st-Century Pandemic" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jeannine Ouellette, "That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Lee Tsai, "The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee: Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Conversations >
        • Blossom D'Souza, "The Imagery of Nature in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet" (Assay 9.2)
        • Kyra Lisse, "Relentlist Women: On the Lists & Catalogs of Natalia Ginzburg & Annie Ernaux" (Assay 9.2)
        • William Kerwin,​ “Life as a Boneyard”: Art, History, and Ecology in One Tim Robinson Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jill Kolongowski & Amy Monticello, "The Mundane as Maximalism of the Mind: Reclaiming the Quotidian" (Assay 9.2)
        • Eamonn Wall, "A Land Without Shortcuts: Tim Robinson and Máiréad Robinson" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Pedagogy >
        • Khem Aryal, "Beyond Lores: Linking Writers’ Self-Reports to Autoethnography" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom: ​Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" (Assay 9.2)
        • Liesel Hamilton, "Creating Nonfiction Within and Against ​Nature and Climate Tropes" (Assay 9.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Late Night Thoughts on What Street Photography ​Can Teach Us About Teaching Writing" (Assay 9.2)
    • 10.1 (Fall 2023) >
      • 10.1 Articles >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Give Them Space: ​Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers’ Grief" (Assay 10.1)
        • Anne Garwig, "Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, Illustration, and the ​Legacy of Collective Memory of the First World War" (Assay 10.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out" (Assay 10.1)
        • Kathryn Jones, "Conveying the Grief Experience: Joan Didion’s Use of Lists in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights" (Assay 10.1)
        • Erin Fogarty Owen, "How to Write Well About Death" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Conversations >
        • Beth Kephart, "On Reading Fast and Reading Slow" (Assay 10.1)
        • Mimi Schwartz, "The Power of Other Voices in Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Pedagogy >
        • Angie Chuang, "Dear(ly) Departed: ​Letter-Writing to Engage the Issue of Racialized Police Brutality" (Assay 10.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Where and How We Might Teach Hybrid: A Pedagogical Review of Kazim Ali’s Silver Road" (Assay 10.1)
    • 10.2 (Spring 2024) >
      • 10.2 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal "(Assay 10.2)
        • Lindsey Pharr, "Brave Person Drag": ​Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Conversations >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "On Difficulty" (Assay 10.2)
        • Thomas Larson, "Paraphrase, or Writer with Child" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Pedagogy >
        • Amy Bonnaffons, "Writing from the Big Brain: ​An Argument for Image and Process in Creative Writing Education" (Assay 10.2)
        • Micah McCrary, "Normalizing Creative Writing Scholarship in the Classroom" (Assay 10.2)
        • Candace Walsh, "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" (Assay 10.2)
    • 11.1 (Fall 2024) >
      • 11.1 Articles >
        • Anna Nguyen, "A Question on Genre: The Binary of the Creative/Theoretical Text in Elif Batuman’s The Possessed" (Assay 11.1)
        • Rachel N. Spear, "Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Conversations >
        • Jehanne Dubrow, "The Essay's Volta" (Assay 11.1)
        • James Allen Hall, "Wholly Fragmented" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Spotlight >
        • Kim Hensley Owens & Yongzhi Miao, "Six Words is Enough: Memoirs for Assessment" (Assay 11.1)
        • Elizabeth Leahy, "Creating Space for Writing Tutor Vulnerability: Six-Word Memoirs in the Writing Center" (Assay 11.1)
        • Jennifer Stewart, "Six-Word Memoirs as Programmatic and Pedagogical Reflection" (Assay 11.1)
        • Katherine Fredlund, "Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Pedagogy >
        • Abby Manzella, "In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum: ​A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand" (Assay 11.1)
        • Peter Wayne Moe, "Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio: On Time, Routines, & Writing" (Assay 11.1)
        • Gwen Niekamp, "The Case for Situating Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ​in the CNF Classroom and Canon" (Assay 11.1)
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