real-time autobiography
TRANSCRIPT
Real-time autobiography
Miriam Rasch ([email protected]) Institute of Network Cultures
MIX 03 Writing Digital, July 2015
My life is a jokeSheila Heti, The New Yorker
Flickr, bambe1964
Autofiction?
Autofiction
Automation
Autobiography
Self writing
Reality hunger
Uncreative writing
Longing for collectivity
Fiction vs. reality
The self as a fiction
Reality = fiction
The self = real
‘new novels – like the abovementioned 10:04, The Wallcreeper, and My Struggle – are redistributing the relation between the self and fiction. Fiction is no longer seen as “false” or “lies” or “make-believe.”’
Autofiction:‘using fiction in the service of a search for the self’
Image [&] Narrative 19 (2007):‘the line between the fictive and non-fictive would be erased’
‘the constant intrusion of a narrator’
Other autofiction characteristics
* Fictional elements* Fragmentation, lists, keywords* Use of multiple media* References to pop culture
Realness ≠ factual but personal
virkelighedshunger?
Flickr: Lori L. Stalteri
Fiction = default
Kavita Hayton, 2009
Personal writing online (Hayton, 2009):‘at the same time public and private, professional and amateur, at once formal and informal’‘a journey, a trial’‘musings, thoughts, throwaway language’‘shared, personal, authentic’
The reader is a confidant, a conspirator; the author is not identified biographically as much as ‘personally’.
Uncreative writing, Kenneth Goldsmith
* Methods like cut-’n-paste, algorithmic writing* ‘Nude media’* Readership > ‘thinkership’* Hyperrealism* ‘Postidentity literature’* ‘Oblique autobiography’
Compelling narrative?
Automatic writing, autobiographical writing
>> Nude media: in intensification of context‘You’re a joke!’
>> Oblique autobiography: mere data is a fiction‘Vital statistics’?
http://maartenvandergraaff.blogspot.nl
‘Free encyclopedia’: * appropriation * (the myth of) ‘automatic writing’
‘Often those sentences aren't even mine. Half twisted news articles, quotes, everything mixed up. Half baked translations of Jack Spicer, a poet I love, are also in there. This whole “Free encyclopedia” came out during a trip that lasted a couple of days.’ (NRC Handelsblad, June 19, 2014)
3. Nude media>> seriousness
‘This isn't a joke to me, not a question of being hip; sometimes it even brings on despair.’
Flickr: Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious
Real-time autobiography:* language and media are inescapable intrusions* everything fiction, no facts* so there’s no reality, only realness* which has to do with personal experience* context is intensified* data is obfuscated* collectivity (the intrusions, the expectations, the overload of data) seems the problem* AND the solution
Real-time autobiography
Miriam Rasch ([email protected]) Institute of Network Cultures
MIX 03 Writing Digital, July 2015
THANK YOU