Weaving Lives: (Auto-)Biographical Practices on the Literary Runet

• Applicant: Dr. Gernot Howanitz
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431170197

This PhD thesis zooms in on a specific aspect of (auto-)biographical writing: the (self-)fashioning of authors in the Russian-language section of the Internet (Runet). In doing so, a desideratum is addressed, because (auto-)biography theory still sees the World Wide Web as an unfulfilled promise of an (auto-)biographical hypertext and at the same time fails to recognize the new creative strategies emerging online. The so-called Web 2.0 with its social networks and blog platforms is primarily a means of (self-)fashioning, which is built upon numerous (auto-)biographical strategies. Images of the author are taken from Russian literary tradition, adapted to the communicative and medial reality of the Internet and created anew in medial experiments. Together with an implicit revaluation of dialogical communication these processes lead to an empowerment of the audience. The thesis analyses (auto-)biographical practices online, strives to identify the creative mechanisms of Web 2.0 and reviews them from the perspective of literary theory. In the spirit of Digital Humanities a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to study a corpus of 29 Russian authors. The focus on writers not only frames the thesis thematically, but also allows to access examples of (self-)fashioning which are diverse, self-reflexive and innovative. At the same time, the influence of new, experimental (auto-)biographical practices on Russian literature can be investigated.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants