Between Erasure and Exposure: Intermedial Autobiography Since Roland Barthes

In my dissertation, I investigate the trend toward intermedial representations of the self in contemporary French personal writing of an autobiographical type. The theoretical framework of my dissertation is based on notions of referentiality presented in La chambre claire, and in essays contemporaneous to Roland Barthes’s by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean Baudrillard. As I demonstrate, they are in dialogue with it, all the while exploring the boundaries of self-representation in relation to illness and death. At the outset, an analysis of the discourses of photography in France from the 1980s to the early 2000s informs my discussion of representations of an expected death in works by Alix Cléo Roubaud, Jacques Roubaud, Annie Ernaux, and Hervé Guibert. I argue that the legacy of a Barthesian conceptualization of the photograph obliges writers to rethink their stance towards representing the self. Through gestures of erasure and exposure, they create an intermedial aesthetic coupling writing, photography, and film to explore anew certain taboos concerning self and death. Intermediality opens up the notions of referentiality presented in Roland Barthes’s La chambre claire: note sure la photographie— the making of traces through writing, memories, and recording the body. The “intermedial” authors selected are central to a trend (begun in the early 1980s and increasingly practiced over the past thirty years) that takes advantage of visual media and writing to explore not only posing for and viewing photographs but also the taking of these images. They also examine the shifting boundaries between intimate and social spaces of the self. By bringing to light their particular poetics, my work attends to the impact of the intertwined representations of the self, illness, and death in the fields of autobiographical works and of visual studies within the academic domain of French Studies