Stories of the Self

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. * Choice *
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. * KULT_online *
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. -- Katherine Sender, author of The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences
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. -- Emeritus Professor Gillian Whitlock, The University of Queensland