AustLit

Traditionally, authors of memoir, life writing, and autoethnography have used prose to tell their stories, with the occasional image to supplement their narratives. In the multimedia age some life writers are turning to art, photography, design and technology to in­crease the scope of their research and writing. In turn, such authors have created new authorial identities and become graphic-authors, artist-scholars, or even bricoleurs. Writing for artist-authors takes on a more Derridean fla­vour, and comes to incorporate all manner of meaning-making inscriptions, including images, design, and non-verbal elements. Readers, too, become active rather than passive, challenged to read against traditional left-to-right reading gravity and to navigate between different textual elements (as they do online). Readers become viewers and participants, and the text shifts from ‘readerly’ to ‘writerly’ in the Barthesian sense. Consequently, authors are designing new hy­brid forms of life narrative for on-screen viewing rather than on-page reading; in other words, for digital rather than paper forms of dissemination and authorship. As screen-based visual-verbal constructions, art(e)facts combine art, virtuality and facts to create evocative critical-creative bricolages. ' (Publication abstract)