Haustein, a research fellow in modern languages at Churchill College, analyzes the transformation of autobiography and self-documentation in the age of mechanical reproduction through the work of Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. The way that photography in particular seizes a living moment and mortifies it is the particular innovation of mechanical reproduction that concerns her. To that end, she pays special attention to the significance of photography in these authors, who variously write about writing life visually, picturing the self, the gaze, the relationship between memory and representation, and the transgression of egotism in pictorial art. She devotes two or three chapters to each writer, and in the section about Benjamin includes several black-and-white self-portraits. Rather than a third essay in the last section on Barthe, she concludes with a summary analysis of the way these authors saw photography change how we relate to ourselves in writing and beyond. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)