Our Selfies, Ourselves: A Cultural History of Self-Representation

Selfies, like smartphones, are everywhere. The genre has a vexed history: from the myth of Narcissus forward, the dangers of looking at oneself—and the problems of memory, truth, and representation—have plagued the form of the self-portrait. Written works are no exception and have been subject to interrogation and suspicion from Augustine in the fourth century to contemporary blogs. This course investigates these questions in relation to historical and current ideas around gender, race, class, and sexuality, and asks how representations of the self have evolved in relation to technology, art, censorship, politics, the marketplace, and popular culture. Through this course, we travel across several centuries, and many genres and mediums. We become familiar with scholarly discussions about self-representation, autobiography, visual culture, theories of beauty and ugliness, fraudulence, manipulation, and media theory. Throughout, we give careful attention to the way in which categories of identity—gender, race, sexuality, class, and other such facets—are created, assumed, critiqued, or adjusted via the representation of self.