The article explores autoethnographic writing through the perspectives of textual analysis and literary sociology. The aim is not only to more clearly define autoethnography as a genre, but to explore the insights offered as the mode of writing crosses boundaries between literary studies and sociology. Such an endeavour requires combining perspectives from literary theory and sociology with cultural theory. This makes it possible to both identify the cultural and sociological claims made by autoethnographic texts, and to consider the role played by cultural theory in the dynamic processes of form generation rooted in expressions of social reality. At the very least, it recognizes the need to incorporate these concepts into our analytical descriptions of these processes. The investigation is based on two assumptions. Firstly, the concept of autoethnography appears frequently in the nascent genre of autobiographical sociology in the United States and Europe. The concept is used within authorial self-descriptions, and in developing poetological descriptions of their autosociobiographical creativity. The second assumption concerns the origins of the term in ethnology, the main field where it continues to be employed. These two observations highlight the need for a more precise understanding of the connection between autoethnography and autobiographical sociology. Taking a systematic perspective, the article first considers autoethnography as a research methodology and the results of this approach, reflecting the genre’s blending of autobiography and ethnography. Autoethnography entails the production of a systematic analysis and description (graphy) on the basis of personal experience (auto), with the aim of illuminating and explicating cultural experience (ethno). The ethnographic insight it seeks can pertain to either ›other‹ cultures or to one’s own. More specifically, autoethnography can be seen as a kind of ›scholarly autobiography‹, in which ethnologists recount their lives in a literary form while contributing to the historiography of science. The context of fieldwork serves here as a framework for exploring intercultural and transcultural modes of interaction and interrelation. Scholars in literary studies additionally regard autoethnography as a paradigm used by authors such as Annie Ernaux (the 2022 Nobel laureate and an important figure in autobiographical sociology). Here, it allows authors the means of taking up the more distanced perspective of a scientific observer in scrutinizing their own identities and self-conceptions. Against this varied background, the article first adumbrates the broad and complex literary sociological field in which autoethnographic writing is situated. This leads to a re-examination of how the term has been used, especially in light of anthropology’s ongoing crisis of ethnographic representation since the 1980s. One outcome of this crisis was a new wave of theoretical and methodological reflection within anthropology that has impacted literary studies. Exploring the place of autoethnography within this context, the article articulates various perspectives on autoethnographic modes of representation. In a third step, serving as an interim conclusion, the article then offers an initial overview of the genre through a synchronic and systematic perspective. The article then takes a diachronic perspective in analyzing examples of ethnographic writing. This approach provides historical insight into the wide variety of formats and genres in which it has been produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a focus on those tied to ethnology. Through a more detailed comparative reading of two recent works – Nastassja Martin’s croire aux fauves (2019) and Heike Behrend’s Menschwerdung eines Affen. Eine Autobiografie der ethnografischen Forschung (2020) – the article explores their engagement with contemporary autoethnography. Both works go beyond the discursive horizon of ethnology, illustrating the breadth and scope of this evolving genre. Finally, the discussion considers the possibility of a global history of autoethnography, of autoethnography as a ›traveling genre‹, arguing that it constitutes a global literary practice characterized by reconfigurations and temporally limited stabilizations of heterogeneous textual elements and narrative methods within unique local, aesthetic, and theoretically informed contexts. The article finally proposes several preliminary avenues for studying these transnational processes of generating form. A key premise for the inquiry as a whole is that autoethnography can help clarify fundamental aspects of autobiographical sociology and of literary-sociological and theoretical debates about this genre.     «

The article explores autoethnographic writing through the perspectives of textual analysis and literary sociology. The aim is not only to more clearly define autoethnography as a genre, but to explore the insights offered as the mode of writing crosses boundaries between literary studies and sociology. Such an endeavour requires combining perspectives from literary theory and sociology with cultural theory. This makes it possible to both identify the cultural and sociological claims made by auto...     »