Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text - Softcover

Hertha D. Sweet Wong (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469640708 ISBN 13: 9781469640709

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018

Synopsis

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text.

Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.

About this title

About the Author

Hertha D. Sweet Wong is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469640708
• ISBN 13: 9781469640709
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288