Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle and the Serial Self

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine, Special Issue on the Postmodern Age, 2020

In 1984, the literary critic and philosopher Frederic Jameson theorized the replacement of the individual subject of the modern era with the fragmented, decentered and multiple ego produced by the postmodern culture, absorbed in a continuous present that erases history and distinguished by a sort of emotional flatness. As postmodern theorists debated contemporary identity, several visual artists produced self-portraits that multiplied, fractured or disguised their image, reflecting on the condition of the ego in contemporary society. Subject to the cultural, aesthetic, social and anthropological transformations, the self-portrait has indeed changed form and symbology over the centuries, infusing the image of the artist with multiple meanings, focusing firstly on a question: how do I want you to see me? In the postmodern context, the answer to this question acquires many forms, as does the representation of the artist’s identity. In order to understand the peculiarity of the self-portraits of this period, the essay will focus on several works, including Spermini (1997) by Maurizio Cattelan, The Book of Food (1985-1993) by Vanessa Beecroft, Untitled #193 (1988) by Cindy Sherman and the Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) by Matthew Barney. Concerning this, the focus will be on the artistic production of the 1990’s because, as far as I can see, it seems to display a relevant maturation of the features that Jameson assigns to the postmodern ego. In the guise of self-projection, duplication and disguise, these and other self-portraits appear as the symbol of a multiple, evanescent and chameleonic ego, aimed at impersonating multiple roles and characters, assuming different self-concepts or a changing identity. In order to analyse these artworks, I will use an interdisciplinary approach combining an art historical and anthropological perspective (Belting, Hall) with postmodern self theories (Jameson, Gergen).

Springer eBooks, 2020

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

The diarization of the self emerged through historically contingent social and economic relations and the practice of accounting as an integral aspect of industrialization and capitalism. From the journal to new media technologies, the recording of everyday life is about the governance and construction of the self, illuminating the ‘everyday’ as a salient dimension of sense-making in relation to the wider world. Accounting the self today has gained renewed prominence through new media technologies and social media platforms and its increasing incorporation into everyday life, inviting a public interface. The teleology of older forms of accounting the self (i.e. the journal) to new media technologies needs to be seen through a continuum in which sociocultural and economic forces enmesh with the medium of communication as a tool of self-expression to capture the self in its diurnal mode. This article utilizes Raymond Williams’ notion of cultural materialism, in linking the diary as a ...

Semiotic mediation has recourse to a more advanced technology which leads humans to form a new aspect of life causing the human and technology to become intermingled. As many media theorists indicate, new media with complexity attempts to disguise the nature of technology, resulting in reflecting the very nature of human, closely imitating human in mind and body. This makes us ponder on who we are as humans and what kind of mediational tools we use. In this paper, I will examine three kinds of mediation which are consciousness, social organization, and technology so as to discover self identity in the digital era. I will specifically look into narrative mediation for consciousness activity for human development according to the two intertwined domains of phylogeny and ontogeny. The idea of development in the two directions is apparent in the digital culture in that an individual should not be confined to a subjective world; rather, an individual functions as the representation of universal characters as human beings. Then, how is this individual being defined as in-between character both in private and in public. I suggest a self-portrait as an autobiographical writing describing self identities in the three domains: the personal self in description in reality, the virtual self in a narrated world from the past, and the expressive self as in thought activity for the future. These three selves in an autobiographical writing in cyberspace will illuminate this point. Keywords: narrative mediation, self, digital culture, consciousness activity, semiotics, self-portrait, autobiographical writing

2017

How do authors/artists represent themselves in comics? The thesis assesses what strategies are mobilised in comics in order to construct an autobiographical self. It explores to what extent the interplay of text and image in autobiocomics can propose new ways of approaching a self that is fragmented, complex and contradictory. As the thesis focusses on the artistic process of producing such fragmentations, my argument is that these fragmentations are represented in autobiocomics in creative and celebratory ways. As I investigate the processes of self-formation, self-learning and self-transformation, I adopt the term "self-crafting" – which emphasises the materiality of autobiocomics and their technical aspects – to refer to the textual and pictorial representations and questionings of these processes in autobiocomics. I examine self-crafting as a relational process, one that relies on the ongoing interplay between text, image and frame, by means of detailed case-st...

Journal of Life Writing, vol. 13, 2024

From the start of his career, Teju Cole has presented himself simultaneously as writer and as photographer, always directing his creative production towards a space with a hybrid and plural nature, going beyond and contaminating performative and semiotic codes, making the textual and visual field interact through particular poietic and compositional strategies. The short novel 'Every Day Is for the Thief' (2007), conceived and structured as an internally layered autobiographical phototextual device, is at the same time also a travel reportage, a memoir, a photo-essay, in which the author's experience is declined in that liminal and porous limbo in which fiction and non-fiction tend to converge. Through an analytical reading, this essay aims to investigate the expressive resources and compositional strategies through which writing and image interact with each other inside the textual field, constantly balanced between depiction and re-semantization, between production and reproduction of the existing, providing a hermeneutic tool of a double matrix to embrace the surrounding reality, trying to provide a representation of memorialistic and individual identity that is at the same time the bearer of universalizable meanings.

Nil Objectives This subject aims to examine how the emergence of different new media has mediated the conception and production of the self, identity, and autobiography by visual and verbal means. The complex human conditions behind such self-representation from different cultures will be investigated. Overview about Interpreting Life Narratives in Different Media (1 lecture) Self-representation in Self-portraiture: Identity Construction (1 lecture) Vermeer, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Kathe Kollwitz, Courbet, Cèzanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Charlotte Salomon, Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Orlan, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Yu Hong, Fang Lijun, & Yue Minjun Self-representation in Photography: Life and Death, and Trauma (1 lecture) Hippolyte Bayard, Eadweard Muybridge, Jhon Coplans, Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alice Odilon, Edward Munch, Andy Warhol, John Heartfield, El Lissitsky, Man Ray, Andre Kertesz, Araki Nobunoshi, Hannah Wilke, Nan Goldin, Jeff Wall, Gilbert and George, Yasumasa Morimura, Xing Danwen & Wang Qingsong Self-representation in Performance Art: Experience and Endurance (1 lecture) Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Rebecca Horn, Joseph Beuys, 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Yves Klein, Stelarc, Yoko Ono, Xie Deqing, Li Mingsheng, Zhang Huan, Yang Zhichao & He Yunchang

Estetyka I Krytyka: The Polish Journal of Aesthetics , 2016

In this paper, I examine how women graphic memoirists--Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and Roz Chast--attempt to draw that which remains fleeting, absent, and abyssal: the so-called "self." I thus extend Jacques Derrida's critique of what he has called the "metaphysics of presence" in philosophy to autobiographical comics, a popular medium that is heavily prefigured by his analysis of the self-portrait as a ruin. I believe this endeavor will help fill the gap in studies about the gendered aspects of Derrida's work "Memoirs of the Blind," as well as the potential of autobiographical comics to illuminate philosophical issues concerning the self. Finally, through my analysis of women's graphic narratives, I hope to point to the possibility of a larger project, that of a feminist Derridean critique of sequential art.