Autobiographical Writing on the Web

Author: Madeleine Sorapure, University of California at Santa Barbara

Autobiographical acts proliferate on the Web: personal homepages, blogs, online journals and diaries, hypertext autobiographical stories and anthologies, webcams, family album sites. Few literary critics have studied this phenomenon because, while autobiography is a flexible and inclusive genre, the Web as a medium pushes on some of the key assumptions and conventions for the genre that have been developed through the study of print autobiography. I posit that the WebÕs hypertextual, multimedia, and interactive capabilities affect the production of autobiographical stories and subjects, and therefore help to transform the expressions of experience and subjectivity that traditional autobiography both presupposes and helps to maintain.

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