The Other Side: Form and Consiousness

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