Experimental Writing as Autoethnography: Thalia Field’s Decentered Stories of Personhood

Abstract

In Personhood (2021), Thalia Field explores the double-sided nature of narrative vis-à-vis human-nonhuman relationships. On the one hand, the author demonstrates how stories can be used to highlight the devastating consequences of failing to acknowledge otherthan- human ways of being in the world; on the other hand, she also suggests that ideas about human specialness grow out of and feed back into the desire for consoling tales, and in particular narratives that reaffirm anthropocentric value hierarchies. To negotiate this dialectic, Field decenters stories, in three, interconnected senses of that term: by engaging in textual play to resituate narratives in wider discourse ecologies; by using such recontextualized stories to extend the scope of personhood beyond the human; and by leveraging these strategies, in turn, for what can be called “storywork,” in which the writer works with, on, and through narratives to probe the broader cultural implications of different ways of telling.