Narrating the self in a contemporary world: bridging autobiography and testimony

The paper investigates new textual forms of autobiographical writing in the contemporary world, and in particular the striking growth of traumatic memories from recent and less recent conflicts. The category of testimony is suggested in order to better describe what appears to be a pervasive phenomenon; from a semiotic point of view one of the main feature of testimony literature is its effect of hybridisation across the boundaries of different textual genres. The paper investigates a transversal feature of contemporary testimony, i.e. the use of a multimodal language composed of both linguistic and visual material, in particular photographs, and analyses contrastively the meaning effects of such use in traditional autobiographical texts and in new hybrid forms of testimony.