This photo by Franco Monsalvo seems to capture symbolically the spirit of the mystory genre: the autobiographical figure at the center, the video feel of the picture, and the text which seems to have oral origins in news broadcasts.
According to Zachary P. Dixon’s article in Kairos, “Our [Electrate] Stories: Explicating Ulmer’s Mystory Genre,” literacy is based on the pre-digital world of print, whereas electracy (an Ulmerian “puncept”), corresponds better to the age of video and the Internet. In Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (2015), Douglas Eyman writes that “Ulmer focuses here [i.e., in Teletheory (2004)] on the image (and video in particular), but his overall body of work has expanded to include the full range of digital media” (p. 46). Dixon writes that, electracy is “recognizable by its dissolution of traditional notions of the linearity, an increased value on the image over narrative structure, and the affective power of multimodality” (Dixon, 2014, para. 1). Literacy, at least as it is traditionally understood, lends itself to a linear and narrative form of presentation that, for many, is out of step in a world where “the possibilities enabled by digital multimodality” keep growing in new and exciting ways (Dixon, 2014, para. 1). For Dixon, the mystory (the concept was first outlined in Teletheory) is “a personal narrative that defies the conventions of literacy . . . in favor of disconnected image driven scenography” (Dixon, 2014, para. 2). Here readers are drawn to the form of the mystory, which they notice is not like the typical autobiographical account one would read in a book or magazine. In a mystory, “images are selected and arranged in deeply personal and expressive ways” and “new meanings are constructed via the assemblage of the author” (Dixon, 2014, para.2). Dixon himself, however, is not wholly convinced by Ulmer’s electracy project, particularly when it comes to education. “If Ulmer’s aspirations truly are to create a pedagogical exercise that challenges the paradigm of literacy as the primary mode of expressing, communicating, and relating to knowledge, I’m doubtful that the mystory lives up to the billing” (para. 3). Dixon’s main concern is the “mind-body split” represented by literacy. Ulmer’s electracy does not, if you will, provide the Cartesian pineal gland solution Dixon might be looking for. On a strictly personal level, however, Dixon reports that he did find rewarding the exercise of coming up with his own mystory (see para. 4). He adds that his experience in putting together a mystory jibe with “previous experiences in creative nonfiction, where the cathartic benefits of personal exposure and exploration is a familiar feeling” (para. 13).
A good example of a mystory (other than Ulmer’s own “Derrida at the Little Big Horn”) might be Elena Maria Rogalle’s “MyStory and the Catastrophe.” Here we are shown how the mystory “is meant to highlight the inherent possibilities for the creation and dissemination of knowledge embodied in digital information and communication technology,” allowing for a great deal of creative expression on the part of authors who embrace electracy (Dixon, 2014, para. 2). Rogalle writes that mystory “is a hybrid genre” that helps us to investigate “our “popcycle,” which include discourses in Career, Family, Entertainment, Community results in insights and discovery through the punctum” (Rogalle, 2020, para. 1). “Punctum” is a word that comes from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (first published in France in 1980 as La Chambre Claire). In his book What Photography Is (2011), James Elkins writes that “[t]he punctum—little point of pressure or pain, hidden in every photograph, waiting to prick the viewer—is still one of photography’s indispensable concepts” (Elkins, 2011, p. ix). “Catastrophe,” in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s use of the term, has to do with “the forward movement of time, not the backward look” (Ulmer, 2004, p. 138). Ulmer’s reading of Benjamin here is informed by Michael W. Jennings’s Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (1987). Ulmer writes that “[i]n mystory I ask, after Benjamin, what image, what tableau, what scene, and also what story from history stings me into an awareness of the temporality of catastrophe” (p. 138). The mystory is composed in such a way as to evoke the effect of montage in a movie. “[F]ragments from widely dispersed places and times” are placed side by side in an inventive effort to bring “into the composer’s awareness hidden features of the present as well as of the past” (p. 138). Rogalle’s mystory draws especially from Ulmer’s Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (2002). Her catastrophe begins intriguingly in this way, “[t]he Florida Monarch Butterfly population has decreased 80 percent since 2005 (Marchese and van Hoose) and I have a role in this disaster” (Rogalle, 2020, para. 3). Ulmer’s catastrophe (as public story), by the way, is Custer’s Last Stand—a massacre; his more personal catastrophe is his father’s gall bladder cancer.
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