Self-Archives in Contemporary Life Writing

An impressive and engaging study, bringing a remarkable assemblage of life writing materials into new discussion, with clarity and theoretical precision. * Professor Clare Brant, KCL, UK *
Marked by an effortless combination of readerly sensitivity and taxonomic ambition, Wojciech Drag’s book authoritatively maps the seven key formats through which experimental modes of life writing have tried to stabilize this existential drift. Beautifully written and consistently attentive to the minutiae of literary form, Drag’s book itself serves as an archive to literature’s continued capacity to shape human experience. * Pieter Vermeulen, University of Leuven *
What are lives but continuously constructed archives? And what are archives but collections imbued with liveliness? Here, Wojciech Drag opens an archive of archives, with an encyclopaedic range that indexes the space between biography and bibliography, inventory and invention, memory and immortality. The result is animated, telling, and timely. * Craig Dworkin, University of Utah, USA *
With the memoir boom and experiments in life writing showing no signs of abating, we addicts of personal narrative gratefully receive Wojciech Drag’s guide to the poetics of lists, indices, databases, inventories and more. Explaining how these forms cradle life stories, Drag also reads for us some of the most confounding publications of the last decades, like David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (2008) or Dana Teen Lomax’s Disclosure (2009, 2011). As thorough as Drag’s research and as clear his writing, there’s nothing about this monograph that betrays intellectual distance. The high stakes for the memoirists emerge through the passionate exegesis of the author of Self-Archives. * Irene Kacandes, The Dartmouth Professor Emerita of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Author of Let’s Talk about Death, Daddy’s War, and Talk Fiction *
This original study makes an original contribution to Life Writing Studies by situating self-archiving within a rich interdisciplinary framework and tracing its literary history beyond the advent of digital media. Bringing together insights from historiography, memory studies and museology, it offers a sophisticated theoretical framework, a helpful typology of self-archiving practices, and compelling close readings. All who study lists, indexes and databases as literary formats opposed to - or as alternatives to - narrative meaning making should take a look at this book. * Dr Anne Rüggemeier, Freiburg University, Germany *