Abstract
As W.J.T. Mitchell has famously noted, we are in the midst of a “pictorial turn.” Women’s life-writing in its diverse forms—diary, autobiography, memoirs—has been affected by the increased presence of images in our lives, which has also given birth to new practices: graphic memoirs, digital memoirs, artistic installations, to name a few. This chapter discusses how multimodality may transform the represented life and the self that derives from it. The combination of the visual, textual, and sometimes virtual forces us to reconsider key aspects of the autobiographical process. The chapter argues that the introduction of images poses particular issues for women life-writers as they strive towards a role as subjects of representation rather than objects. Gendered politics of image-text affects how women writers process memory, defines their own identity, and considers referentiality and the representation of their bodies. The chapter examines theoretical assumptions surrounding text-image, engaging in a dialogue within French and Anglo-American scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
In art history and visual studies, the disciplines that study visual culture, the terms “pictorial” and “iconic turn” found in Boehm (1994) and Mitchell (1994) emphasize the need for a change of paradigm in approaching visual artifacts: these should not only be interpreted or read, but also experienced. So the pictorial turn is in actual fact ontological (Moxey 2008).
- 2.
Mitchell mentions the philosopher Nelson Goodman as the main critic of semiotics.
- 3.
For a discussion on the “politization of memory,” see Susannah Radstone, Bill Schwarz, eds. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, Fordham University Press, 2010.
- 4.
See also “La grande famille des Hommes” in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957.
- 5.
For a discussion of the digitization of memories, see José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, 2007.
- 6.
Laura Marcus, “‘The split of the mirror”: Photography, Identity and Memory.” Paper presented at the 2018 FAAAM conference on Women’s Life Writing in Text and Image (University of Paris Ouest Nanterre).
- 7.
The acronym ICO coined by Kaufmann means “Immediate, Contextualized, Operational” (Invention de soi, 172).
- 8.
Tilmann Habermas and Christin Köber. 2015. “Autobiographical Reasoning is Constitutive for Narrative Identity: The Role of the Life Story for Personal Continuity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development, ed. K. McLean and M. Syed, 149–165. New York: Oxford University Press.
- 9.
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- 10.
“To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969).
- 11.
Interview with Jennifer Hayden reproduced in Andrew Kunka, Autobiographical Comics, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 229–243.
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Baisnée-Keay, V. (2021). Introduction. In: Baisnée-Keay, V., Bigot, C., Alexoae-Zagni, N., Genty, S., Bazin, C. (eds) Text and Image in Women's Life Writing. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_1
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