We are pleased to invite you to the fourth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester!
Jonathan Alexander
(University of California, Irvine)
The Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections on Damaged Life
Thursday, April 24, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Since the publication in 2015 of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, the genre that has come to be known as autotheory has risen as one of the privileged genres — if not the privileged genre — of the American literary establishment. A hybrid genre, autotheory sifts insights from critical theory through the lived experiences of individuals, often from traditionally and systemically marginalized groups in US society. Some recent critics have criticized autotheory as a predominantly marketplace phenomenon driven by often highly over-educated and culturally elite writers seeking new audiences (beyond the academy) for their work. In this view, autotheory seems little more than a sophisticated form of navel-gazing produced by writers seeking to capitalize on the narrative spectacularization of their marginality.
Working with and against this critique, Alexander argues in this talk that autotheory is better understood as the most recent manifestation of a form of critique traceable to Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Formally comparable in its aphoristic style, autotheory shares with Adorno’s work a worrying over the “splinters” of contemporary existence as capable of providing larger insights into both late capitalist and fascist cultural and structural formations. Alexander draws on some recent autotheoretical texts as well as his own experience as a writer of autotheory to illuminate how autotheory, at its best, is never simply an indulgence in navel gazing but rather an acute attention to to the movement of capitalistic and fascistic forms of anti-life — an attention equally redolent with the desire to root in embodied experience forms of resistance necessary for imagining and living in our world otherwise.
Who?
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-two books, he is most recently the coauthor with Sherryl Vint of Programming the Future: Politics, Resistance, and Utopia in Contemporary Speculative TV, as well as the forthcoming book, Damage: Queer Meditations on Art. Alexander also writes creatively and has produced a series of award-winning memoirs, including Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir.
