Gabriele Rippl’s talk focuses on transcultural and intermedial aspects of contemporary Anglophone life writing. Against the backdrop of recent debates in the fields of autobiographical research and intermediality studies, autobiographies and autofiction by internationally renowned, transcultural writers such as Edward Said, Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole and Aleksandar Hemon will be discussed. An interdisciplinary and comparative frame will help to gauge how transcultural lives characterized by mobility, migration and dis-/integration are written today. As intermedial configurations, these texts include photographs and/or employ other visual strategies such as ekphrasis to evoke images and to negotiate topical questions regarding different notions of identity, concepts of representation, takes on mediality/materiality and today’s global mediascapes.

Response: Hanjo Berressem (Universität zu Köln)