Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography

· University of Chicago Press
電子書
293
頁數
符合資格

關於這本電子書

Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act.

Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself.

Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs.

Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.

為這本電子書評分

請分享你的寶貴意見。

閱讀資訊

智能手機和平板電腦
請安裝 Android 版iPad/iPhone 版「Google Play 圖書」應用程式。這個應用程式會自動與你的帳戶保持同步,讓你隨時隨地上網或離線閱讀。
手提電腦和電腦
你可以使用電腦的網絡瀏覽器聆聽在 Google Play 上購買的有聲書。
電子書閱讀器及其他裝置
如要在 Kobo 等電子墨水裝置上閱覽書籍,你需要下載檔案並傳輸到你的裝置。請按照說明中心的詳細指示,將檔案傳輸到支援的電子書閱讀器。