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Focusing on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) and Han Kang's The White Book (2016), this contribution explores how contemporary life writers critically engage with the causally and temporally bound form of narrative through the use of story-critical forms such as lists, vignettes, and meditations. While scholars of narrative agree that we witness a new dominance of the generic conventions of traditional autobiography—especially its trope of redemption and conversion narratives—among storytellers on digital platforms as well as in advertisement, marketing and political campaigns, the literary genre of autobiography, this article argues, starts to reinvent itself. The life writers Nelson and Kang turn toward the essayistic rather than the affirmative, the enumerative rather than the narrative, and the unity of form rather than the linear and causal cohesion of storytelling. Bluets and The White Book show their authors as deeply involved in imagining alternative acts of literary representation that exceed the scripts and protocols that are usually activated and called up through the story-ing of the self. As Nelson and Kang explore the story-critical affordances of fragmentary literary forms and test the limits of experientiality (sensu Fludernik), they highlight the opaqueness of life and ask for non-subsumptive readings (sensu Meretoja).

Hanna Meretoja / Colin Davis (Eds.): Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative. New York: Routledge 2018. 314 p. EUR 115.99. ISBN 978-1-138-24406-1

Drawing on queer theory (Barker, Cvetkovich, Halberstam, Warner) and Foucault’s concept of biopower, my article will explore the exuberant use of lists in Ellen Forney’s graphic somatographics Marb...

The first chapter offers a substantial introduction that surveys previous scholarship on lists and list-making and situates the simple but versatile form of the list in its historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. Starting with an etymological contextualization of the term list, the introduction presents the list as a piece in the making—a handicraft—to then embrace the literary, poetic, and cultural manifestations of list-making throughout the centuries. As it invites us to reflect on how art or knowledge is produced through enumeration, the introduction further provides a condensed, analytical, and original discussion of the list as an epistemic, a literary, and a visual form.

This essay argues that the ambivalent nature of shame – a feeling that oscillates between the personal and the public, between hiding and uncovering – is meaningfully illuminated in narrati...

In this essay, I want to draw attention to the meaningful dynamics between life writing and list-making and the form of the list in the context of literary autobiography. The intriguing nature of t...

Reflecting the authorial self as well as their own production, autobiographic texts are often perceived as “narcissistic.” By drawing on narratological and psychoanalytic theories about nar...

The forum “Life Writing and the Poetics of List-Making” aims to contribute to current scholarly discussions about the form of the list in literary discourses as it sets out to explore life narrativ...

During the production process of her graphic novels, Alison Bechdel poses for all the characters (including her own former self), then makes a photo via a self-timer, and finally reproduces this photography via her hand drawing. As a consequence, her comics not only combine words and (drawn) pictures, but they also materialise various modes of experience: first, Bechdel performs a scene from the past with her own body, then she takes a photograph of that performance, then she reproduces the photograph in the mode of a handmade drawing, then that drawing is put into print via technical reproduction. Especially in the context of graphic auto/biography, this production process triggers certain questions concerning authenticity and self-staging. However, Bechdel not only performs her former self, but also re-embodies other people’s past experiences, which becomes particularly clear when she starts to learn her late father’s handwriting to be able to reproduce his letters to her mother. Against this background...