Intermedial experimentation in contemporary autotexts

My doctoral project looks at contemporary intermedial autofictional and autotheoretical forms, through a focus on twenty-first century examples of literary and visual media work by multidisciplinary writers. I consider the intermedial in a two-fold manner: as engagement with multiple forms of media within a text; and secondly, as the transposition of work situated in one medium into another. The term ‘intermedia’, popularized by Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s, lends its use as a description of the dissolution of boundaries between conventional modes of art-making and for new forms that are difficult or yet to be compartmentalized. I specifically take up the concept of the intermedial through a focus on imagetext forms. Doing so, I examine how the role and politics of the ‘image’ have produced contemporary forms of literature that mix the autobiographical with fiction, criticism, and theory. Such inter-genre, hybrid literatures have been commonly classified by literary critics as ‘autofiction’ and ‘autotheory’, for example. Yet despite the influx of scholarly attention on such literatures in the twenty-first century, there is no settled consensus on their definitions, as well as the kinds of work they cover. But it would seem possible that autofiction, auto theory, and cognate sub-genres such as ‘post-fiction’, are more similar to each other than they are different. I contend that current conceptions of the autofictional and autotheoretical, broadly conceived, have correspondingly been developed and shaped by cross-references and fertilizations between written and visual acts of self-narration, as much as literary inter-genre experimentation. My doctoral project tests this hypothesis by examining twenty-first century work by contemporary multidisciplinary writer-artists whose auto-fictional and auto-theoretical work reference, combine and travel between writing, photographic, and moving image-based mediums such as Teju Cole, Moyra Davey, Isaac Julien, Nathalie Léger, Valeria Luiselli, and Paul B. Preciado. Doing so, the project aims to open a conversation on the relationship between intermedial experimentation and genre-based experimentation in contemporary self-narratives. Examination of medial and generic blurs and crossings aims to elucidate the different functions, representations, and vexed instabilities of the ‘auto’ across different forms and media. Attention to a work’s intermedial aesthetics aims to develop understandings on the myriad forms and media that comprise contemporary ‘autotexts’ (McKenzie Wark, 2023) today.

Keywords: autofiction, autotheory, aesthetics, contemporary literature, visual culture, image-text studies, intermediality, critical theory, theories of media, photography, film, subjectivity, representation.