The German “Auto-“. Fiction, Theory, and the Essay in the First-Person Singular

The first-person singular is a ubiquitous narrative device in contemporary German literature in fiction as well as in essays and non-fiction. Autotheory, however, which so far has attracted attention primarily as a US export, is, as of now, still less established. In this talk, I will survey the current landscape of German auto-writing and will focus on the first-person singular in particular, as well as on the criticism of all things “auto-” in recent debates (e.g. in Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy). I am especially interested in understanding how these developments continue and complicate the tense relationship between subjectivity and knowledge production in academic texts.

Hanna Engelmeier is a Visiting Professor at the Universität der Künste, Berlin and is a permanent Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI), Essen. She was trained as cultural historian and has worked among other things on the history of anthropology. Her most recent research studies the essay in theory and practice. Her books include Trost. Vier Übungen (Matthes & Seitz 2021), and a re-edition of Auerbachs Figura (with F. Balke, Fink, 2016). She has widely published in the Journal of Literary Theory, Merkur, Mittelweg 36, in various collected volumes, as well as in the taz, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.