ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE

1. ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE ‘I’ IS ANOTHER: AUTOBIOGRAPHY ACROSS GENRES Camelia Elias

2. Diane Arbus (1923-1971)Cindy Sherman (1954)

3. Arbus (Nemerov) • born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family • the younger sister of Howard Nemerov, who served as United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions. • attended the Fieldston School for Ethical Culture • worked extensively as a photojournalist, her photos appearing in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and Sunday Times magazines • her suicide was much publicized

4. Arbus • rejected the conventional style of the 50s. • rejected the 50s aesthetics and social values of the fashion industry • documented people on the fringe of society • preferred the large, square format • uneven black borders

5. autobiography in portraiture • photographed subjects that mirrored her own predicament • boredom • dullness • lack of recognition • banal situations • routine • documented gender inequality • the consequences of affluence, preteen angst, and the constraints of femininity

6. aesthetic aim as cultural aim • “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity. I was confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could only feel as unreality.” • photographs must unleash the observer’s private despair and back-alley secrets • “a photograph is a secret about a secret” • photographs must be like boomerangs • bring out the aberrant, the violent, and the perverse • focus on the subject’s eye

7. compositions • sharply focused photographs • minimalist in composition • voyeuristic approach • mise-en-scene / prearranged sets • ordinary citizens in unconventional poses and settings • insisted on getting acquainted with her subjects • sets combine plastic qualities with literary narrative • identical compositions • symmetry • enclosed space of a room

8. pictorial narratives • form and metaphor • bring out fascination and discomfort • story line suggests that nakedness is not nudity • emotional famine and interior draught • the specific becomes general • the violent frontal approach to the subjects takes away the focus per se on the subjects • intention is ambiguous • documentation becomes masquerade

9. performing photographs • interested in the performative quality of gender (Naked man being a woman) • literalizes the process of becoming • acts as a do

10. auto-dis-guises • “Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect … what you intend never comes out like you intend it” • pseudo-auto-bio-graphical statements

11. paratextual autobiography • The Arbus estate control her heritage • they control the biographies, which they choose to call ‘autobiographies’. • claim to want to offer an ‘unmediated’ view of Arbus • “The photographs needed me” (Doon Arbus, on her intent to preserve the sanctity of her mother’s art)

12. the demand to become Arbus • Nile Selkirk dives into Arbus’s collection and claims to emerge as Arbus • his task is “to discover the essence through the pursuit of the surface, and whenever to reinvent the process in order to remain true to the essence” • becoming a medium between the dead artist and her work

13. Fictionalizing the biography • Fur (trailer) • Never is a promise

14. Cindy Sherman • interested in the visual arts at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. • saw as the medium's limitations, and shifted photography. • "[T]here was nothing more to say [through painting]. I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead."

15. The gaze • the gaze: • is a mode of viewing reflecting a gendered code of desire • the look: • a perceptual mode open to all while the gaze • “to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze” (Jonathan Schroeder 1998, 208).

16. The gaze in photography and film • men as subjects identifying with agents who drive the narrative forward • women as objects for masculine desire and fetishistic gazing (Mulvey, 1975) • men are active, worldly, individualistic • women are passive, domestic, dependent

17. Gaze typology • the spectator’s gaze: the gaze of the viewer at an image of a person (or animal, or object) in the text; • the intra-diegetic gaze: a gaze of one depicted person at another within the world of the text • the direct [or extra-diegetic] address to the viewer: the gaze of a person (or quasi-human being) depicted in the text looking ‘out of the frame’ • the look of the lens - the way that the camera itself appears to look at the people depicted; less metaphorically, the gaze of the photographer

18. deconstructed pictorial narratives • coded narratives are made specific • dimensions of gender are reverted • stereotypes are unfolded Strategies: • be in the text (the condition for autobiographical narrative) • control the mise-en-scene • select the formats of the images in which the self-representation of the photographer appears

19. authentic vs. artificial selves • create hybrids: model, photographer, artist, film star • create ready-made images • use already formulated cultural stereotypes • ‘acting’ casts herself as: • film noir vamps • plucky career girls • Hitchcock heroines • soap-opera sophisticates • New Wave, neo-realist actresses

20. auto-auteur • auteur theory: • a director's films reflects that director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary “auteur” (author) • representation of the self through meta/self-consciousness: • images are seductive, enticing, forceful, calm, relaxed, poised, sophisticated • creates ‘short stories’ • creates a variety of identities • creates a plethora of selves

21. the postmodern artist/self • accomplishes not a sustained autobiographical narrative, but an autobiographical pastiche of fragmentary quoted selves mixed with critics’ theories. • POINT: we are the narratives we create