Date Published:

Abstract:

The article inquires into the place and function of autobiography in today’s “hypermnesic” (Hayles) social, medial, and cultural situation. It discusses Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, Day, Fidget, and The Ideal Lecture, which hardly anyone reads as autobiographical texts. In a self-reflective and quasi-theoretical manner Goldsmith opens the question of a “life record,” pointing at the medium of language and its performance, and at the media in a technological sense. In an attempt to theorize the way digitization changes the possibilities of subjectivizing the lived, experienced presence and human memory, this study relies on the concept of “tertiary retention” (Stiegler) and problematizes the notion of memory and “archive.” It also points at “ideality” or “utopia,” as used in Goldsmith’s The Ideal Lecture, in light of the problem of language as a memory device and the inherently temporal narrative structure we are used to give to our lives.

December 2024:  Miroslav Kotásek is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. After studying English and Czech languages and literatures, he devoted his Ph.D. thesis to the topic of self-referentiality, especially in narrative texts. Despite dealing with the topic primarily within a literary theoretical framework, this research has led him to broader questions of media borders and capabilities, the relationship between fiction and “reality,” and the domains of affect and performance. In his university courses or in his writing he struggles with these topics ever since, adding culture theory and the study of popular culture to the mix. Nowadays he is mainly concerned with the representation of Holocaust and the role of memory in general, the study of autobiography (life-writing), and the construction of the future in different discourses. He is also active as a translator of non-fiction (e.g. Frank Kermode, Hayden White, Dick Hebdige).