Hybridity in Life Writing Combining Text and Images

This book offers new perspectives on text/image hybridity in the context of life writing. Each chapter explores the very topical issue of how writers and artists combine two media in order to enhance the autobiographical narrative and experience of the reader. It questions the position of images in relation to text, both on the page and in terms of the power balance between media. It also shows how hybridity operates beyond a semantic and cultural balance of power, as the combination of text and images are able to produce content that would not have been possible separately. Including a range of life writing and different visual media, from paintings and photography to graphic memoirs and social media, this edited collection investigates the point at which an image, whether fixed or moving, enters the autobiographical act and confronts the verbal form.

1 Introduction, Arnaud Schmitt.- Section I. Photography, text, photographic texts_2 Teresa Brus, ‘Arenas of Hybridity’.- 3 Nancy Pedri, ‘Photography, Intermediality, and Graphic Illness Narratives’.- 4 Griselda Pollock in dialogue with Joanne Leonard, ‘Hybrid forms of Becoming in Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008)’.- 5 Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty, ‘In Search of a Lost Past: Family Photography and Postmemory in Michael Ignatieff’s The Russian Album (1987)’.- 6 Clare Brant, ‘Inserting the Manfish: hybridity in underwater memoir illustrations’.- 7 Silvia Hernández, ‘Beyond Authentication: Text and Image in Patti Smith’s Autobiographical Prose Work’.- 8 Marie-Agnès Gay, ‘“Moving shadows disappearing”: Erasure of Self in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Autobiographical “Photo-Essay”’ (Exilée – Temps Morts – Selected Works).- 9 Anne Green Munk, ‘Picturing ourselves through others – Text and Photography in Sally Mann’s Hybrid Life Writing’.- 10 Veronica Ceruti, ‘Writing a Life Written in Pictures: Postmemorial Phototextualities in Helena Janeczek’s La ragazza con la Leica (2017)’.- Section II. The materialities of hybridity: artists, autobiographies, textualities, images and graphic narratives_11 Julia Watson, ‘“This Counter-history”: Teju Cole’s Pandemic Visual Diary on the Kitchen as a Domestic/Postcolonial Medi[t]ation’.- 12 Anthony S. Foy, ‘Black Bodies, Displayed and Displaced: African American Autobiography after the Halftone’.- 13 Alex Belsey, ‘“Leaving the marks in”: the Dialectic of Journal & Drawings by Keith Vaughan’.- 14 Virginia Terry-Sherman, ‘Ambiguous, Enigmatic and Absent Imagery in Contemporary Culinary Memoirs’.- 15 Suzanne Joinson, ‘Messy Archives of the Self: Life Books and Ephemera of Carolee Schneemann and Francesca Woodman’.- 16 Natalie Saudo-Welby, ‘Sounds and Silence made Visible: Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014)’.- 17 Hélène Tison, ‘Allie Brosh’s Hateful Narcissism’.- 18 Pablo Allepuz García, ‘Autobiographyto Self-Portraiture, or Vice-versa: Narrativity and Visuality in Artists’ Life Writing’

Arnaud Schmitt is a professor of American Studies at the University of Pau, France. His field of research is contemporary American literature and he has worked extensively on the concepts of autofiction and self-narration for almost two decades. His book, The Photographer as Autobiographer, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022