The personal turn: U.S. nonfiction, 1980-2022

Thesis

The Personal Turn: U.S. nonfiction, 1980-2022 analyzes the personal politics of U.S. nonfiction across the past forty years. Each of its chapters focuses on a key author or authors, a major nonfiction sub-genre, and a relevant critical discourse. These are: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s mid-career queer critical essays; Frank B. Wilderson III’s memoir, Afropessimism, and the Black Studies manifestoes of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney; Claudia Rankine’s lyric essay series; and The Best American Essay anthology series. At the heart of the project is a nuanced distinction between an entrepreneurial politics of personal writing, and what the thesis identifies as a set of more collectivist, solidaristic, intimate, and impersonal strategies that often conflict with and complicate the personal writing of the authors it takes as its focus. The thesis roots the distinction between these formal political strategies in a schism in 1980s feminisms: between ‘personal’ academic feminist epistemology, which often placed an assimilative stress on representation and relatability, and Black and women of color feminisms in the same period, in which—as in the work of writers such as Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa—autobiography frequently grounds a solidaristic politics of ‘difference.’ Reading with scholars of neoliberalism, the thesis considers the entrepreneurial politics of the ‘personal turn,’ contextualizing the turn in relation to the conglomeration of publishing and the neoliberalization of higher education. In the archive of The Best American Essays series, the thesis finds an expression of this entrepreneurial politics of the personal, manifest in personal essaying. In the work of critics such as Sedgwick, Wilderson, Moten and Harney, and Rankine, meanwhile, the thesis finds more ambiguous and ambivalent representation of and relationship to the personal ‘I.’ The project shows that while the personal can never be excised from critique, the personal qualities of criticism—and the sub-genres critics choose to inhabit—shape the kinds of claims they can make. Ultimately, the thesis offers timely interventions in its four primary areas of scholarship, while giving the first sustained formal and historical account of the personal turn, a turn that is still pressingly underway.

Authors: Smith Hughes, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gpqypeky4
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: manifestos; nonfiction; feminism; queer theory; Black studies; lyric; autotheory; Afropessimism; essays; literary criticism; autobiography
• Subjects: Essays; Queer theory; Autobiography; Creative nonfiction, American; Lyric poetry--History and criticism; Criticism