Our next reading group is on Monday 28 April 4-4.45pm (BST). We will discuss ‘Auto-Theory and Form’ led by Liesl Jensen. If you require access to the suggested reading, please contact revelsoffice@gmail.com.

Liesl has prepared the following prompts:

Auto-theory is a genre of academic, critical writing that combines personal reflection or memoir with more traditional forms of academic theory. As such, it is both a distinct genre in-and-of-itself, and a sub-genre of both theory and memoir. This makes auto-theory a particularly interesting genre to analyse in terms of form. Its form, sometimes more than its content, asks important questions about the purpose of academic writing, its goals, and its intended audience. Auto-theory also brings to the fore questions of the role of the personal in academic work. It is standard practice in most academic writing to make the self invisible and
to approach your object of study with as little personal baggage, agenda, or bias as possible. Auto-theory suggests that not only are the author’s personal experiences impossible to shed, and therefore important to acknowledge in scholarship, but also that personal experience, even personal bias, might be productive and helpful. For this session, I am interested in us exploring the form of auto-theory, rather than a specific piece of writing and its content. As such, I have provided a selection of two pieces that use auto-theory so that we can discuss the form across multiple authors, time-periods, and subjects. The reading selection is thus a little bit longer than normal, but much of it is not heavy academic theory, and therefore hopefully a quicker read.

The first selection – a few pages at the start and end of Noemie Ndiaye’s introduction to Scripts of Blackness – I know has been read by some Revels Office members before, but I am interested in re-reading this section together less for content than for form this time. I chose a portion of Ndiaye’s introduction because it provides both an example of how auto-theory might be applied to a specifically early modern research context, and because it demonstrates how auto-theory might be applied to a smaller portion of the project, rather than being a through-line of the project.

The second selection is from Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling. I chose this portion of Cvetkovich because Depression: A Public Feeling investigates the formal boundaries of auto-theory. After this introduction, the first section of the book is an extended memoir of her own experience with depression, and the second half of the book are three chapters that use more traditional forms of literary and critical writing. Her introduction explores the intersection of these styles of writing and her methodology. The final reading is a selection of the memoir section of her book to give a sense of how it is structured. Although I disagree with her theory at several points, I think it is an interesting piece to explore in terms of form.

Some prompts for us to consider as we read these selections:

• What are these authors doing that is the same? What are they doing that is different?
• How does Ndiaye’s need to connect her personal experiences to a very different time period influence her use of personal narrative, or her use of critical academic texts? Is Cvetkovich free to do anything different because she is not connecting personal experience exclusively to historic texts?
• What do the personal revelations from the authors add to the pieces? What do they subtract? Do you think about these authors in a different way after reading? What are the pros and cons of that?

If you’d like to join us, please contact revelsoffice@gmail.com for the Zoom link. For reminders of upcoming reading groups, you can sign up to our mailing list.