Flinders University

Andrew Miller

Eschatologies, and future-looking reminiscence

Abstract
Traditionally, authors of memoir, life writing, and autoethnography have used prose to tell their stories, with the occasional image to supplement their narratives. In the multimedia age some life writers are turning to art, photography, design and technology to in­crease the scope of their research and writing. In turn, such authors have created new authorial identities and become graphic-authors, artist-scholars, or even bricoleurs. Writing for artist-authors takes on a more Derridean fla­vour, and comes to incorporate all manner of meaning-making inscriptions, including images, design, and non-verbal elements. Readers, too, become active rather than passive, challenged to read against traditional left-to-right reading gravity and to navigate between different textual elements (as they do online). Readers become viewers and participants, and the text shifts from ‘readerly’ to ‘writerly’ in the Barthesian sense. Consequently, authors are designing new hy­brid forms of life narrative for on-screen viewing rather than on-page reading; in other words, for digital rather than paper forms of dissemination and authorship. As screen-based visual-verbal constructions, art(e)facts combine art, virtuality and facts to create evocative critical-creative bricolages.
Keywords: graphic life writing, autoethnography, artist-scholars

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Dr Andrew Miller is a Senior Lecturer in multi-literacies at Flinders University. He is the author of Raging Against the Mass-Schooling Machine: An Autoethnography of a Beginning Teacher (2017). Andrew’s research interests include graphic texts, creative non-fiction, autoethnography, and critical and creative approaches to research. His work challenges the prose-centrism of traditional research by incorporating images and design into its meaning-making process. Andrew supports the expansion of the term writing to include non-verbal and graphic elements as readily as it currently embraces words and prose. Andrew has published critical and creative work in Wet Ink, TEXT, Creative Approaches to Research, English in Australia, Liminalities, and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Contact: andrew.miller@flinders.edu.au