| Summary: | International audience Social media have considerably expanded the modalities of writing the self. Being a constant invitation to self-exposure, they have transformed life narratives. Online presence has shaken the foundation of autobiographical writing allowing narratives to stray away from a retrospective tradition to privilege a more immediate presentation of the self – or of the selves, as “online avatars” (Whitlock and Poletti) build up the digital persona of writers who engage with technology. Autobiographical writing often derived from a wish to look back and examine a life that was worth telling. Serge Doubrovsky even claimed that autobiography was a “privilege reserved for the important people of this world” and famously coined the word “autofiction” back in 1977, the better to stress the fictional dimension of the self, forever attaching its search to a literary “adventure”. The post-digital environment seems to have proved him right for the core paradigms of autobiography have shifted: it is no longer about looking back, but rather looking forward, trying to cope with a multitude of fragmented selves. Exploring oneself through technology challenges retrospection, the self being heralded as a project to which anyone can participate in an ever-interactive dimension. Hence writing in the first person no longer is necessarily relevant, contemporary autobiography being “thou-rather than I-directed” (Robert McLaughlin). In that presentation, we will address a text written by American poet Noah Eli Gordon (1975-2022), Inbox (2006), which deeply reflects the new direction autobiography has taken in a post-digital context. This life-based entirely draws upon digital communication, being composed of a collection of emails Gordon received. Partly absent from his autobiographical project, the author questions subjectivity, its disappearance and fragmentation. We suggest his work, being radically relational, reads like an attempt at reaching out but also portends the exhaustion of the self.
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