How do we tell our own story in the media era?
Dr Anna Poletti (Modern and Contemporary Literature) was interviewed by Henry Jenkins about her new book Stories of the Self. Life Writing after the Book. In this book Poletti 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.
"My starting position is that we are both digital and analogue", Poletti says. "If by analogue we mean being material, geographically and temporally located and bounded. (Lockdown in the pandemic has brutally reminded most of us just how local and material our lives are.) A comparative media studies approach as I use it involves a constant movement between digital and analogue forms, in order to see what insights into autobiography and its role in shaping the social field emerge when we take media affordances and materiality seriously as conditions for autobiographical statements and their reception."
Stuff studies
"Stuff studies seems to me to be a vital tool for understanding the intersection of the analogue and digital planes of our existence as well. Stuff studies allow us to make meaning: when we have a strong and ongoing interaction with specific materials they become an important element of our lived experience (they become part of our lives) and they become a means for us to live in particular ways."