Bio

Lina Zhou is a PhD candidate in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies and a member of the Doctoral Program in Literary Studies at the University of Basel. She holds an MA in British and North American Cultural Studies from the University of Freiburg (Germany) and an MEd in English, Fine Art, and Educational Sciences from the University of Cologne (Germany). Her research interests lie at the intersections of literature, art, and sociology as well as of cultural theory, art theory, and popular culture.

Abstract

Her project with the working title “The Visuality of Class Mobility in Anglophone Autosociobiography” investigates the role visuality plays in and around Anglophone autosociobiography, an emergent mode of writing that combines autobiographical narration with sociological reflection on inequality. In the flourishing scholarship on autosociobiography, its visual dimension has not yet been systematically studied. This project addresses this lacuna by offering the first book-length study of visuality both in its textual representation and in its paratextual dimension. It asks how images are described, evoked, and referred to within autosociobiographical texts, and how visual paratexts mediate and inflect the narration of class mobility. Methodologically, the project combines close reading with paratextual analysis. Its close readings are informed by intermediality and ekphrasis theory, especially the work of Werner Wolf, Gabriele Rippl, and James Heffernan, as well as by sociological and philosophical theory on class mobility by Pierre Bourdieu and Chantal Jaquet. The paratextual analysis, grounded in Gérard Genette’s work, also draws on recent cultural studies perspectives on the visual representation of poverty. Through this combined methodology, the project examines the interplay between verbal and visual configurations of class mobility in the genre of autosociobiography.