Showing papers in "Biography in 2015"
TL;DR: In Online Lives 2.0 as mentioned in this paper, the coeditors reflect on continuities and analyze new developments in Internet-based auto/biographical production since the advent of Web2.0.
Abstract: Looking back to Biography ’s 2003 “Online Lives,” the coeditors reflect on continuities and analyze new developments in Internet-based auto/biographical production since the advent of Web 2.0. They outline recurring themes in the essays in Online Lives 2.0 , which include the merging of public and private life, online self-curation, the socioeconomic dimensions of online self-presentation, and the filtering and falsification of lives in social media, and they explore the implications of these issues for auto/biography studies.
35 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the significance of online celebrity and self-branding through the case study of popular YouTube video blogger Jenna Marbles, and explore how Marbles negotiates the demand for feminine "hotness" in this competitive, networked media landscape.
Abstract: This essay explores the significance of online celebrity and self-branding through the case study of popular YouTube video blogger Jenna Marbles. I ask how the forces of commoditized web spaces shape self-representation, and explore how Marbles negotiates the demand for feminine “hotness” in this competitive, networked media landscape. Central to this essay is how girls use self-mediation to negotiate a system that insists on consuming them as objects, while maintaining their autonomy as subjects.
24 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors pose a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink "life" and "writing" as automedia, and propose a new approach to life writing in virtual worlds.
Abstract: Online environments are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity itself might come to mean in virtual worlds. This essay poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink “life” and “writing” as automedia.
23 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the transits between the fictional and the autobiographical by deploying notions from narratology, including a proposal regarding the difference between "fiction" and "the fictive", reflections on metatextual performance, and the idea of the implied author.
Abstract: Focusing on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being , this essay engages the transits between the fictional and the autobiographical by deploying notions from narratology, including a proposal regarding the difference between “fiction” and “the fictive,” reflections on metatextual performance, and the idea of the implied author.
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the significance of accessing the secret police files in life writing produced by the 1.5 generation of communist surveillance, and show the numerous changes life narratives undergo in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe, illustrate the ever increasing complexity of life writing in global contexts, and point to new routes of memory with regard to communist oppression.
Abstract: The opening of the archives in the former Eastern European bloc has led to heated political debates in the ex-communist countries, lustration, and the reassessment of the Cold War experience, both east and west. This essay focuses on the significance of accessing the secret police files in life writing produced by the 1.5 generation of communist surveillance. I read Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Kati Marton’s Enemies of the People to consider what happens to communist life narratives of an oppressive state apparatus when taken up by children of communist dissidents, how transnational identities and life stories emerging from post-Cold War Eastern Europe impact the genre, and what the implications of this new autobiographical form are for life writing from and about Eastern Europe within the post-communist and global contexts. By mapping the range of relationships between such autobiographical writing and the secret police files it incorporates, I show the numerous changes life narratives undergo in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe, illustrate the ever increasing complexity of life writing in global contexts, and point to new routes of memory with regard to communist oppression.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on maritime voyages filmed and narrated by asylum seekers, where they become "producers" of their own testimonial narratives that are then disseminated through both conventional and new media.
Abstract: This article focuses on maritime voyages filmed and narrated by asylum seekers, where they become “produsers” of their own testimonial narratives that are then disseminated through both conventional and new media. Social media offers new venues and opportunities for the dissemination of testimony generated by the asylum seekers, from within the boats, trucks, and planes that transport them. Asylum seekers are not citizens seeking democracy in the public spaces of their own homelands; on the contrary, they are stigmatized as the barbarians at our gates, and as a threat to the security of the nation. In their hands, however, smartphones and social media enable new forms of testimonial narrative, from within spaces of detention. Can we speak of the hospitality of cyberspace on behalf of the dispossessed?
14 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of interface, interactivity, and organization are key to articulating autobiography theory that can account for popular new modes of online autobiographical writing taking place at social networking sites and in data-driven, visually-based infographic self-representations.
Abstract: Concepts of interface, interactivity, and organization are key to articulating autobiography theory that can account for popular new modes of online autobiographical writing taking place at social networking sites and in data-driven, visually-based infographic self-representations.
12 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how readers might bear witness to chronic pain memoirs by leveraging insights gained through the sequential reading of comics toward an ethical practice, and explore the role of comics in this process.
Abstract: Book design—including the elements of cover image and author photo—offer conceptual matter from which meanings of authorship and identity emerge. In the case of memoirs about chronic pain, these peritexts also employ a complicated visual iconography of disability that may rely on assumptions about agency and ability that pain memoirs themselves challenge within their covers. This essay explores how readers might bear witness to chronic pain memoirs by leveraging insights gained through the sequential reading of comics toward an ethical practice.
11 citations
TL;DR: Rodrigues as discussed by the authors argues that an epistemological commitment to data collection creates a distinct aesthetic in life narratives, and argue that an abundance of data creates a sense of multiple, co-present identities within a given subject.
Abstract: This essay proposes that an epistemological commitment to data collection creates a distinct aesthetic in life narratives, and argues that an abundance of data creates a sense of multiple, co-present identities within a given subject. Focusing on The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans , a collection of “lifelets” edited by Hamilton Holt (1906), Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), and The Soul of an Immigrant (1921), the autobiography of Constantine Panunzio, Rodrigues shows how the identities that these subjects iterate are in flux, and thus the subjects are constantly in transit among their identities.
9 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the politics of biographical practice and representation on the site and found that Wikipedia biography is a culturally significant, yet overlooked form of digital life narrative, through an examination of Wikipedia policies and discussion forums, and a number of its most popular and controversial biographies.
Abstract: Wikipedia biography is a culturally significant, yet overlooked form of digital life narrative. Through an examination of Wikipedia’s policies and discussion forums, and a number of its most popular and controversial biographies, this essay explores the politics of biographical practice and representation on the site.
8 citations
TL;DR: The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 IBA conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged. The essays have been divided into two areas of inquiry: Documents and Displacements. Those in the first section address the status of the document as a technology of the self, or think about how cultural producers document their lives. Essays in the second section explore critical approaches and texts that signify how both the study of life writing and its objects of inquiry are themselves in transit, and have the potential to change our ideas about the field itself.
TL;DR: The authors explores the strategic deployment of the life narrative genre by the lawyers of designated enemy combatants as part of the human rights activism against the unlawful detainment of prisoners at the US military prison in Guantanamo.
Abstract: This article explores the strategic deployment of the life narrative genre by the lawyers of designated enemy combatants as part of the human rights activism against the unlawful detainment of prisoners at the US military prison in Guantanamo.
TL;DR: The authors examines two graphic biographies about Robert Oppenheimer that use visual strategies to overcome some of the narrative problems of prose scientific biography, and they argue that we should consider scientific graphic biography as a specific genre that installs a biographical eye (as opposed to the auto/biographical I) to explore the complex relationship between empirical knowledge and affective experience that shapes lives caught between science and politics.
Abstract: This article examines two graphic biographies about Robert Oppenheimer that use visual strategies to overcome some of the narrative problems of prose scientific biography. I argue that we consider scientific graphic biography as a specific genre that installs a biographical eye (as opposed to the auto/biographical I) to explore the complex relationship between empirical knowledge and affective experience that shapes lives caught between science and politics.
TL;DR: A Gay Girl in Damascus as mentioned in this paper is a case of online imposture that emerged in conjunction to the "Arab Spring" and catalyzed a host of issues connected to the representation, articulation, and circulation of marginal identity in online spaces.
Abstract: Blogs can connect disparate "others," or focus attention on certain events, moments, or histories, but to what extent does the blog function within (or trouble) the paradigms of identity politics that also frame autobiographical narration in online contexts? This paper is a close analysis of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a fast moving case of online imposture that emerged in conjunction to the "Arab Spring" and catalyzed a host of issues connected to the representation, articulation, and circulation of marginal identity in online spaces.
TL;DR: There is a certain degree of confusion regarding the term "metabiography", which has been used to refer to both comparative historiographical studies and post-modern narratives as discussed by the authors, and its concerns with self-consciousness and fictionality are at once older and more universal.
Abstract: There is a certain degree of confusion regarding the term “metabiography,” which has been used to refer to both comparative historiographical studies and postmodern narratives. While metabiography may come of age with postmodernism, its concerns with self-consciousness and fictionality are at once older and more universal.
TL;DR: The authors considers the history of Russian thinking on the genre of biography, focusing on the Romantic and post-Romantic intellectual tradition that grants to the biographical subject the power to craft one's own self.
Abstract: This article considers the history of Russian thinking on the genre of biography, focusing on the Romantic and post-Romantic intellectual tradition that grants to the biographical subject the power to craft one’s own self. This tradition can still be found to be operative in the work of Yuri Lotman and Lydia Ginzburg.
TL;DR: It may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography than any other branch of the arts as mentioned in this paper, and at the intersection of life writing and digital humanities, key questions can be posed: In what ways does the Web act to co-shape identities? How permanent are digital records of lives? Will we soon remember differently?
Abstract: It may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography than any other branch of the arts. At the intersection of life writing and digital humanities, key questions can be posed: In what ways does the Web act to co-shape identities? How permanent are digital records of lives? Will we soon remember differently?
TL;DR: The authors traces how post-feminism, an ideology that celebrates consumerism and disavows feminism, has influenced the evolution of the breast cancer memoir and discusses how retailers and corporate cause marketers have in some instances impeded the delivery of feminist messages in some of these works.
Abstract: This article traces how postfeminism, an ideology that celebrates consumerism and disavows feminism, has influenced the evolution of the breast cancer memoir. Paratexts surrounding three twenty-first century breast cancer memoirs are discussed to show how retailers and corporate cause marketers have in some instances impeded the delivery of feminist messages in some of these works.
TL;DR: The authors argue for a reading strategy that positions Among Flowers in conversation with A Small Place to reveal a more nuanced understanding of Kincaid's diasporic status, and argue that Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya remains an underexplored text due to the conflicted, diasporaic subjectivity that readers encounter within the book.
Abstract: Jamaica Kincaid’s second travel narrative, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya , remains an underexplored text due to the conflicted, diasporic subjectivity that readers encounter within the book. This essay argues for a reading strategy that positions Among Flowers in conversation with A Small Place to reveal a more nuanced understanding of Kincaid’s diasporic status.
TL;DR: The Note Books of a Woman Alone (1935), the posthumously published notebooks of an impoverished London clerk, provokes reconsideration of what counts as an individual voice as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Note Books of a Woman Alone (1935), the posthumously published notebooks of an impoverished London clerk, provokes reconsideration of what counts as an individual voice. More than half the text is comprised of quotations and extracts; Evelyn Wilson’s textual collecting, however, was deeply enmeshed with her diary writing. Blurring transcription and expression, her practice of self-inscription lays bare the intersubjective nature of self-definition and the composite nature of any textual voice.
TL;DR: A ten year old investigation of the impact of web cams on the nature of life writing and the self was carried out in this paper, where the trajectories of these older technologies and practices continue to have relevance today and provide a reasonable ground from which to continue our explorations into current and emerging technological practices.
Abstract: This essay reflects on my now ten year old investigation of the impact of web cams on the nature of life writing and the self. Despite the many changes that have occurred since that time, the trajectories of these older technologies and practices continue to have relevance today and provide us with a reasonable ground from which to continue our explorations into current and emerging technological practices.
TL;DR: Clark as mentioned in this paper used a non-linear, hyperlinking structure to create a kind of metabiography anchored by Wittgenstein's life and philosophy, and used the constellations both as a navigation device as well as metaphor for how we make meaning.
Abstract: The author discusses his Internet artwork 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein , which uses a non-linear, hyperlinking structure to create a kind of metabiography anchored by Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy. Clark uses the constellations both as a navigation device as well as metaphor for how we make meaning (or pictures of meaning, as Wittgenstein would say), using the facts of Wittgenstein’s life to address the external relations of his life to the outside world, as digital media provides an opportunity to create a new kind of textuality that examines the relations of exteriority a life story has to our current situation.
TL;DR: In this paper, an "ethics of interruption" is proposed to address the relational stakes of constructing and consuming online lives, broadening the scope of what counts as an act of life writing.
Abstract: This essay notes an intersection between extreme acts of online stalking and everyday acts of online identity construction: both are marked by repetition. I propose an “ethics of interruption” to address the relational stakes of constructing and consuming online lives, broadening the scope of what counts as an act of life writing.
TL;DR: In this article, the author traces her journey into the early world of video blogging, in which participants used video to share the self, develop empathy for others, and exchange knowledge Moving from modest video blogs to an internationally-screened film demonstrated in a direct way that under the right circumstances participatory cultures work peer-to-peer mentorship and connected learning can open new forms of digital and participatory literacies in media cultures.
Abstract: The author traces her journey into the exotic, early world of video blogging, in which participants used video to share the self, develop empathy for others, and exchange knowledge Moving from modest video blogs to an internationally-screened film demonstrated in a direct way that under the right circumstances participatory cultures work Peer-to-peer mentorship and connected learning can open new forms of digital and participatory literacies in media cultures
TL;DR: In this article, the author explores the author's decision to stop blogging after a person close to the author revealed herself to be a hostile secret reader of the blog, and uses this experience to raise larger questions about online audiences and intersections between public writing and private life.
Abstract: This personal essay explores the author’s decision to stop blogging after a person close to the author revealed herself to be a hostile secret reader of the author’s blog. The author uses this experience to raise larger questions about online audiences and intersections between public writing and private life.
TL;DR: The authors describe how, through launching the Biography issue "Life in Occupied Palestine" in Palestine and elsewhere, contributors' stories took on a life and generated stories of their own, while continuing to document the impact of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, point towards possibilities for decolonial dialogue, friendship, community, and political organizing.
Abstract: This essay describes how, through launching the Biography issue “Life in Occupied Palestine” in Palestine and elsewhere, contributors’ stories took on a life and generated stories of their own—ones that, while continuing to document the impact of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, point towards possibilities for decolonial dialogue, friendship, community, and political organizing.
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TL;DR: In this article, the author reflects on the evolution of her blogging practice, and how she became a blogger "kinda by accident" and how increasing involvement in the blogging community led to a decision to live certain parts of her life in public.
Abstract: The author reflects on the evolution of her blogging practice. After becoming a blogger “kinda by accident,” increasing involvement in the blogging community led to a decision to live certain parts of her life in public, in a networked age where visibility can be both humanizing and de-humanizing. Studying teenagers and their relationship to social media leads to questions about what it means to be a blogger today, as traditional aspects of power are now asserted through technologies that are deeply embedded in contexts of capitalism, traditional politics, and geoglobal power struggles.
TL;DR: In this paper, Zalis discusses how At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes influenced a novel that she later wrote, Arella's Repertoire, in which the narrator stages autobiographical scenes of her own in cyberspace.
Abstract: Elayne Zalis discusses how “At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes,” the essay that she published in the 2003 Online Lives issue of Biography , influenced a novel that she later wrote, Arella’s Repertoire , in which the narrator stages autobiographical scenes of her own in cyberspace. Like the websites that Zalis examined in her essay, Arella’s Repertoire explores new ways to share personal and cultural memories in the digital age.
TL;DR: The authors investigate how distinct rhetorical situations that converge on websites complicate how people present themselves on those sites and report on a sample of businesspeople who present aspects of their personal lives on their professional sites.
Abstract: This article probes behind familiar self-presentational genres to inquire into how distinct rhetorical situations that converge on websites complicate how people present themselves on those sites. It reports on a sample of businesspeople who present aspects of their personal lives on their professional sites.