Calling attention to the unseen mediation and re-mediation of life narratives in online and physical spaces, this ground-breaking exploration uncovers the ever-changing strategies that authors, artists, publishers, curators, archivists and social media corporations adopt to shape, control or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Concentrating on contemporary life texts found in the material book, museums, on social media and archives that present perceptions of individuality and autonomy, Reading Mediated Life Narratives exposes the traces of personal, cultural, technological, and political mediation that must be considered when developing reading strategies for such life narratives. Amy Carlson asks such questions as what agents act upon these narratives; what do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose; how do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”; and finally, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? An examination of the range of sites at which vulnerability and intervention can occur, Carlson does not condemn but stages an intercession, showing us how it is increasingly necessary to register mediated agents and processes modifying the witnessing or recuperation of original texts that could condition our reception. With careful thought on how we remember, how we create and control our pictures, voices, words, and records, Reading Mediated Life Narratives reveals how we construct and negotiate our social identities and memories, but also what systems control us.
Amy Carlson is Serials Librarian and Head of Collection Services Division, University Hawai'i at Manoa Library, USA. She has published several articles in The Serials Librarian. Her research focuses on how materiality, reformatting, access, and use accentuate or limit experiences with texts.
Kate Douglas is a Professor in English at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of
Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (2010) and the co-author of
Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (2016; with Anna Poletti). Her edited collections include (with Ashley Barnwell)
Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (2019). Kate is the Head of the Steering committee for the International Auto/Biography Association's Asia-Pacific chapter.
John David Zuern is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai?i at Manoa and a co-editor the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His recent work on life writing and digital literature has appeared in Comparative Literature and (with Laurie McNeill) in the volume Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge 2019).
Anna Poletti is Associate Professor at Utrecht University and co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Their recent work on life writing includes
Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (2020), and the entry “Identity Technologies” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.
