Memoirs of a cyborg: American autobiography as a genre of the (post)human
View/ Open
Date
07/12/2021Author
Carpintero Torres-Quevedo, Maria Elena
Torres-Quevedo, Maria
Metadata
Abstract
This dissertation will look at the relationship between autobiography and the
construction of the American subject. The introduction will outline the parameters of the
genre and its shared history with the discourses of Enlightenment humanism and
American national identity. It will then go on to explore posthumanism as a philosophical
and political response to the naturalisation of the subject constructed by those
discourses. I argue that there is an emerging field of posthuman autobiography in the
United States that uses generic variation to dramatise the failures of American
Enlightenment rhetoric and the experiences of subjects marginalised by both the rhetoric
and the sociopolitical environment that it is a product of and that is simultaneously
perpetuates and obscures. My chapters will go on to look at particular cases of such
posthuman autobiography, deploying posthuman theory with a particular American focus
alongside genre-focussed close reading to elucidate what the theory reveals about the
texts and how the texts dramatise and contextualise the theory in turn. The four chapters
will look at Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, Roxane
Gay’s Hunger, and convergence era televised autobiographical works. I have focussed
specifically on autobiographies written by women in part because of the pervasiveness
of traditionally masculine traits in the discourse of the Enlightenment subject, but also
because a number of foundational posthumanists, such as Donna Haraway and
Katherine Hayles, have theorised the field with women at their core. I have also chosen
autobiographies that portray a spectrum of experiences of marginalisation within the US,
looking at the way factors like class, race, and sexuality influence and inform the
American subject. I argue that these autobiographical texts offer a radical challenge to
the subject that has been central to American discourse.