Libby King

Using the autotheoretical strategies of writers such as Maggie Nelson and Billy-Ray Belcourt, this essay explores how experimental literary forms including autotheory, fictocriticism, autoethnography, and autofiction – disrupt the boundaries of cultural conversations. I use blended forms to explore family separation, colonisation, subjectivity, climate change, and the boundaries between science and mythology. The implicit argument, founded on the works of Amitav Ghosh, is that literary forms developed in the nineteenth and twentieth century do not frame content in ways that address the primary concerns of the early twenty-first century. In a practical application of the idea that “the form is as important as the content,” I use autotheory to consider how form changes the way content is negotiated, discussed, and understood. Experimenting in a practical re-ordering of the “neoliberal town square” and “stream of consciousness as form,” I use critical theory and autobiographical narration to bring kitchen-table conversations into a theoretical landscape.

In this paper, I suggest that autoforms—writing like autofiction, autotheory, fictocriticism, and autoethnography—act as cultural interventions in neoliberal landscapes. I suggest they make explicit promises to their readers: that the text will be self-consciously political; that the form will challenge neoliberal logics; and that, counter-intuitively, the subject won’t be the narrator themselves, but the neoliberal landscape they navigate. Neoliberalism contains two important contradictions: the appearance of democratic ideals alongside the practice of consolidating economic and social power (MacEwan 2015, 170). To obscure this, neoliberal societies are full of double-binds that inevitably undermine concepts of truth and expertise (Strassheim 2023, 107–108). The narrative tools to rationalise these contradictions appear throughout the neoliberal landscape, resulting in normalised hypocrisy and endemic irony. For example, authors who narrate through the close first-person are labelled narcissists, while the omniscient godly narrator is a shield against accusations of narcissism. The logics of neoliberalism are often so nonsensical that countering them risks becoming equally absurd; instead, by editing ‘all that’, autoforms reframe these logics and allow new ways of seeing the cultural landscape—not explicitly through content but implicitly through form. The paper summarises my presentation at the 2024 IABA World Conference.

Narrative form is often taken for granted, a set of storytelling rules that go unnoticed and unseen; similarly, colonialism benefits from an internal invisibility that resists observation. This autotheory essay considers the interplay between colonialism and invisibility, and explores how narrative form can act as a cultural intervention. The essay suggests that autoformssuch as autotheory, fictocriticism, autofiction, and autoethnographyexpose invisible cultural rules and intrinsically alter the way content is understood. It is especially concerned with how colonialism uses authorship to limit internal observation and critique and suggests that by refiguring the ‘I’ and the ‘we,’ autoforms expose these invisible internal rules. It argues that autoforms actively reconfigure the boundaries around many of the early twenty-first century’s major cultural conversations about representation and appropriation, lived experience and expertise, and public space and private space, as well as notions of identity, othering, consciousness, and embodiment. The paper approaches form not just as narrative structure, but also as a tool, a technique, a strategy, and an intervention that inherently impacts content and changes how the cultural landscape is seen and navigated. Through comparing the yellow soils of southern Australia and Gaza, the grammar of Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the path of water and rivers, the essay explores how the form we use to tell stories is often as important as the content.