Autotheory’s genre-dissolving style mirrors precarious academic labor generalism

Evidence

For Nelson, autotheory is the fun, free wilding in “lack of partition,” what she also calls in The Argonauts “flow … plethora … kaleidoscopic shifting … excess”—so many virtues of immediacy synonymized by her flexible labor. “I can teach most anything in the humanities I want” is at once a product of her position as a tenured full professor at a wealthy school and an inverted image of the generalism now demanded of most contingent humanists who “fall out of boundaries or disciplines” and cobble together employment teaching in “writing” programs—which have grown exponentially in recent decades, including as majors and fields of advanced research, all while English majors on the whole have declined. This efflorescence of writing without reading and Nelson’s bounding omnivorism bespeak immediacy as genre dissolve: in its blur, autotheory and autofiction function as two names for the same thing: wilding against genre, against theory, against fiction, against mediation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 138

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core causal thesis — economic/academic labor structures condition culture’s impatience with form. Directly relevant to judging her debt to Jameson.
• SEED: The decline of English majors amid the growth of ‘creative writing’ programs as institutional cause of immediacy’s ascendancy is a strong essay angle.
• QUESTION: Is the alleged explosion of writing programs actually the causal driver of immediacy’s hold, or a correlational detail?