ABSTRACT
The somewhat skeletal quality of my title bespeaks a necessary theoretical embarrassment toward the project at hand. To my mind, “Autobiography as Criticism” is a graceful rubric: it sets up neither category as an integrity opposed to all other integrities, but it simultaneously implies that whatever the interconnectedness between autobiography and criticism, only the vitality of difference could permit them to serve as surrogates for the other. The topic, in other words, draws a quickened attention to the very status of genre as a complicity of strategies, and disallows dull engagements in how established forms of discourse resist or accommodate alternative and equally impervious “forms.” As a consequence, I felt obliged to use that loaded Arnoldian term, “criticism,” without resorting to such intellectual coyness that would demand a title like “Criticism(s) and Its/Their Alterity” or “Critic/Ism and Its Altar-ity.” Those days of uncomfortable hieroglyphics with which the academy sought in futility to declare its unease with generic categories now appear to be over. At least, it was something of a shock for me to glance over this year’s program for the English Institute and realize that in all the twelve titles for the current talks there was nary a parenthesis, nor a pun, nor a hyphenated term, nor any inverted or disinverted commas: no, there was no point of punctuation more complicated than a colon.
