Lifework - by Moran Sheleg (Hardcover)

About the Book

This collection explores what Roland Barthes termed the 'autobiographical turn' in art, literature and critical theory since the mid-1960s. Through a variety of perspectives, it examines the relationship between work and life, notions of the 'self' and what autobiography might mean today.

Book Synopsis

Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the 'self' as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book's chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.

From the Back Cover

What does 'lifework' mean? In his 1967 essay 'The Death of the Author', Roland Barthes described Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu as a form of 'lifework' that changed how autobiography would be written forever. Barthes's words would prove prophetic, as the following decades saw a return to this much-derided genre, albeit through a string of artistic transformations that challenged, interrogated, and reimagined the notion of the 'self'.

Offering a set of approaches spanning art history, literary theory, feminist, Black, trans, and queer studies, this book takes the work of art and the process of artmaking as starting points for examining what a 'lifework' might constitute and what it suggests about the relationship - both historical and contemporary - between life and work. Featuring artworks by Moyra Davey and Susan Morris, as well as examples of autotheory by Teresa Carmody and Marquis Bey, the book doubles as a space in which different forms of life-writing take place.

With further contributions from Jo Applin, Lucy Bradnock, Alice Butler, Miguel de Baca, Rye Dag Holmboe, Margaret Iversen, Alistair Rider, Abi Shapiro, and Moran Sheleg, Lifework is a valuable resource that brings together a range of established and emerging voices.

Review Quotes

'Lifework offers an inspiring intellectual history of the trends flagged by its title... [and] transforms the concept of selfhood into something meaningful once again.'
Burlington Magazine

About the Author

Moran Sheleg is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia