Withdraw
Loading…
Writing the self with others: collaborative photobiography in the 21st century
Swisher, Emily Rene
This item's files can only be accessed by the System Administrators group.
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132790
Description
- Title
- Writing the self with others: collaborative photobiography in the 21st century
- Author(s)
- Swisher, Emily Rene
- Issue Date
- 2025-12-02
- Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
- Gaillard, Julie
- Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
- Gaillard, Julie
- Committee Member(s)
- Mall, Laurence
- Reynolds, Felisa
- Rushing, Robert
- Department of Study
- French and Italian
- Discipline
- French
- Degree Granting Institution
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Degree Name
- Ph.D.
- Degree Level
- Dissertation
- Keyword(s)
- photography, autobiography, collaborative life-writing
- Abstract
- Etymologically speaking, the term autobiography has specific limits: hailing from the Greek words autos, bios, and graphein, the word designates, by its very construction, a self-written account of one’s own life. By this definition then, autobiography is a genre that categorically excludes plurivocal narration. What then, should we make of life stories recounted by multiple authors? How do we account for self-written narratives that are the product of collaboration? How can the photograph complicate the notion of self-writing – how does it graph, anchor, and form the center of life stories told by more than one voice? In testing the limits that autobiography conventionally imposes, these three questions will form the basis of inquiry for my dissertation. As I will argue, the place of the photograph in collaborative life stories of the 21st century cannot be understated – the photo is the very sticking point for collaborative self-expression across print, installation art, film, and social media sites in the works under investigation in my corpus. Collaborative photobiography, then, is arguably becoming a nearly omnipresent feature of our daily lives: how we shape and react to these self-narratives, relayed through image and text, has broader implications for how the genre develops in the future. While seeming to contradict the very definition of autobiography, the collaborative photobiographies in my corpus herald a new age of self-writing – one that proves that stories of self are increasingly cooperative, multivocal, and, importantly, predicated on photographs as the catalyst for connection and narration.
- Graduation Semester
- 2025-12
- Type of Resource
- Thesis
- Handle URL
- https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132790
- Copyright and License Information
- Copyright 2025 Emily Swisher
Owning Collections
Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at IllinoisManage Files
Loading…
Edit Collection Membership
Loading…
Edit Metadata
Loading…
Edit Properties
Loading…
Embargoes
Loading…