The Selfie on Europe’s Shores: Ai Weiwei and the Selfie as a Means of Safe Passage

Abstract

In the introduction to On Histories and Stories, A. S. Byatt argues that ‘those of us who write about modern writing have a duty to keep the discussion open’ in order ‘to create new paradigms, which will bring new books, new styles, new preoccupations to the attention of readers’. This paper considers how Byatt’s suggestion about the role of the critic writing about living authors can be adapted for scholarship and criticism that seeks to respond to new forms of life writing that have emerged in the digital age.