Autobiographical Genre in the Age of Complexity: A Case Study of Neuro-Autobiographies

This presentation aims to explore the autobiographical genre under the lenses of an emergent interdisciplinary methodology known as ‘complexity theory’ (Waldrop 1992; Jörg 2011; Wells 2013) in order to provide new insights into non-linear interactions between an autobiographical ‘self’ and its environment. The autobiographical genre gained propulsion during the Enlightenment period as historical men influenced by Newtonian thinking recorded their life reflections and accomplishments (Kadar 1992; Anderson 2011). Since then, autobiographical genre has evolved, becoming more diverse and gendered, including ordinary people’s life stories and voices that are translated and (self)-narrated (Bruner 1987; Smith & Watson 2009). Moreover, the 21st century autobiographical accounts use a variety of media platforms, producing a ‘networked self’ (Jolly 2012) that designs narratives of performance that reverberates experiential stories, as nodes of relationality and intertextuality emerge organically in the public sphere. Hence, autobiographies become complex, undetermined, non-linear and flexible. In this view, I argue that autobiography shifts from a genre to a self-organization model with its sub-types featuring complexity and hybridity. As consequence, the autobiographical ‘self’ also becomes a complex entity. To illustrate this discussion, this presentation focuses on autobiographies of women with brain disorders, to which I use the term ‘neuro-autobiography’. I examine the case of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who survived a stroke as a young woman. She narrates and performs her story through different media formats such as a published autobiography and a TED Talk video in the internet. I study how the autobiographical self shifts into an agent category that becomes self-organized and interacts with other agents and actants, that is, humans and objects. Furthermore, I discuss interconnectivity and intertextuality as important nodes in a rhetorical ecology that allows the autobiographical agent to engage and act/react from within outward.