What is autobiography and how does it transform in the age of technological reproducibility?

Katja Haustein discusses this question as it relates to photography and the role of emotion in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1909-22), Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-38), and Roland Barthes's Roland Barthes (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980).

In her close critical readings, Haustein provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of these popular works, mapping them against little-studied textual, visual and aural material, some of which has only recently become accessible.

In this way, her book opens new avenues in scholarship dedicated to three outstanding twentieth-century writers and contributes to a field of critical inquiry that is still in the making: the history of autobiography in the light of a history of the gaze.