Reading for connectivity: Aesthetics and affect in intermedial autobiographies 2.0

Autobiographies 2.0 are affect-saturated texts. Studying them therefore demands a shift from content to form and its affective work. In literary studies, the affective turn has generated a renewed interest in the ways in which emotions can be aesthetically experienced by readers. This attention to the interactive relationship between readers, authors and text is a staple of reader response theory and has laid the groundwork in new media studies to theorize the blending of these designated roles (such as Bruns’s concept of produsage). Affect theory can also shed light on the dynamic process of establishing kinship and a sense of belonging to networked identities on the web. My article offers a discussion of the aesthetic strategies through which online intermedial life writing affectively interpellates its readers. As a case study, I analyse the online curated art project Family Line-Ups, which features twenty sets of family portraits (each consisting of three photos of family members from different generations) and verbal narratives that relate to them.