Stories of the Self

The importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politicsIn an age where our experiences are processed and filtered through a wide variety of mediums, both digital and physical, how do we tell our own story? How do we “get a life,” make sense of who we are and the way we live, and communicate that to others? Stories of the Self takes the literary study of autobiography and opens it up to a broad and fascinating range of material practices beyond the book, investigating the manifold ways people are documenting themselves in contemporary culture. Anna Poletti explores Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, a collection of six hundred cardboard boxes filled with text objects from the artist’s everyday life; the mid-aughts crowdsourced digital archive PostSecret; queer zine culture and its practices of remixing and collaging; and the bureaucratic processes surrounding surveillance dossiers. Stories of the Self argues that while there is a strong emphasis on the importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics, mediation is just as important in establishing the credibility and legibility of life writing. Poletti argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.

Poletti’s Stories of the Self addresses a scholarly gap at the intersection of autobiography studies and media studies that has long persisted. Combining social constructivism with a media and materiality focus, Poletti (Utrecht Univ., Belgium) looks at the assortment of cultural artifacts that has traditionally been the focus of those who study life writing., Marks a promising change of scholarly focus from narrow literary autobiography to other media materialities. With a productive reorientation and vivid analyses, Poletti extends a convincing invitation to researchers from life writing studies to take into account an even larger variety of contemporary media and material practices that shape how diverse lives come to matter., A corrective to traditional approaches that privilege the book as the ideal medium for life stories, Anna Poletti not only asks which lives come to matter, but also how they are lived through matter, how matter matters. Stories of the Self provides readers a genealogy of the material production of the self, and especially non-normative and queer selves. From Andy Warhol’s ephemera to the anonymous crowdsourcing of PostSecret, Poletti offers reparative alternatives to life writing as we’ve come to know it., What kind of digital life did you have in the middle of 2013? Had you taken a selfie yet? Did you have a blog? From the beginning, this dazzling book has you hooked. Anna Poletti returns to a field of autobiography studies she pioneered – intimate ephemera – and gets personal. We must think about our use of media and materiality to make sense of our lives, she insists, to encounter the lives of others and the agency of matter, both human and nonhuman. In a series of case studies various and sometimes rogue scholarly practices focus on the agency of diverse things: rummaging in the cardboard boxes in the Warhol archives; reading the camera as an actor in documentary scenes; tracking the remediation of surveillance dossiers; mapping the entrepreneurial coaxing of crowdsourced autobiographies. In the process, we engage with a rigorous interrogation of recent theorising in the humanities and social sciences on material culture and materiality, queer theory, posthumanism, media studies and communication by one of the most original and innovative critics in autobiography studies now.

Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University and co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation.