Selfie narrative: automedial construction of subjectivity in Russian-language auto-fictional texts
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-3-13
- Pages
- 222-238
Abstract
The autofictionality of the latest Russian-language literary texts encompasses various ways of creating autobiographical identity. The term ‘automediality’ was proposed by Christian Moser and implies an interdisciplinary approach to writing narratives based on biographical material: authors working on creating an autofictional image of themselves in the text use a variety of means of technological media for self-representation. This article examines two strategies of automedia within autofictional works: the use of video and photographic descriptions in Oksana Vasyakina's poetic statement “Kazan Text” (2024) and the diary form with the incrustation of a photograph of the cinematic heroine Laura Palmer in Natalya Meshchaninova's story “Literary Exhibitionism” (2023). Both texts feature the onomastic and subjective identity of the author-hero-narrator, characteristic of autofiction as a mode of writing, while the identities of the heroines are constructed in relation to significant others. The aim of this study is to examine in detail the techniques of automediality functioning in contemporary Russian-language texts with hybrid genre specificity, as well as to reveal the metaphorical similarity of autofiction to the gesture of taking a selfie, which simultaneously demonstrates the image of the subject, its objectivity, and the instrument used. The methodological basis of this article can be considered the psychoanalytic works of Lacan, Uslaner, as well as research in the field of autofiction and autotheory by Muravyova, Wagner-Egelhaaf, and Fournier. In autofictional texts with automediality, the subjectivity of authors and characters is constructed in relation to the Other. This figure can be quite concrete (close ‘others’) or abstract (the Other), representing a certain discursive power that controls the subject. In addition to automediality, the authors of the texts use various metadiscursive practices of self-exposure to create a setting for the referentiality and documentary nature of the autonarrative.
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