“To Save My Own Life:” The Revisionary and Sustaining Practice of Autotheory

Autotheory, a hybrid of autobiography and literary theory, is the term Paul B. Preciado used to describe his book Testo Junkie (2008), a term Maggie Nelson then borrowed as a label for her book The Argonauts (2015). Though the term autotheory is relatively new, such hybrid writing has a rich literary history which I trace to intersectional feminist writers like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks in chapter 1’s genealogy. I argue that autotheory participates in theory’s work even as it revises certain Theoretical assumptions that hold sway in the academy today. This dissertation names three contemporary American books as examples of autotheory, a practice that, I argue, deserves the attention of academics even as it pointedly reaches an audience outside of academia. In Mark Doty’s What is the Grass, Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Read Until You Understand, and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, these writers use the practice of autotheory to revise a facet of “Theory” and they use their own lives to theorize anew. This dissertation includes my own practice of autotheory in chapter 5, based on archival research into the life and writings of Eudora Welty. My goal is to demonstrate how autotheory can bridge the divide between public interest in reading and the academic study of literature. In chapter two, Mark Doty revises the dominance of the New Critical practice of close reading, twisting its call to objectivity by reading “between the lines” based on his “felt understanding” in order to interpret Walt Whitman’s biography and poetry. In chapter three, Farah Jasmine Griffin revises assumptions about the origin of theorizing as she writes her own “Black girl brand of literary criticism,” the theorizing she learned in her Black community long before she entered the academy (“Thirty Years” 172). In chapter four, Jenn Shapland revises academic standards for proof with her “makeshift epistemologies” of embodiment in order to access the life of Carson McCullers. In chapter five, my own autotheory repairs a divide between personal and academic knowledge. The authors included here recognize that Theory has, in some way, excluded their experiences. Countering their exclusion, these authors use autotheory to make space for understandings based on their own lives