(The paper is part of an ongoing dissertation project) Arab American writing has undergone an enormous expansion during the past three decades. Especially the genre of autobiography has emerged as a dominant means for Arab Americans to negotiate their identities. In addition to gaining a voice in the literary field, however, Arab Americans have also become more visible in the American public due to their involuntary media presence. Especially foreign political conflicts in the Middle East and the advent of international terrorism in the wake of 9/11 have fostered stereotypical images of Arabs in the public eye. Media images thus form the discursive context in which Arab American authors memorize and write their lives. My paper investigates the interrelated link between mass mediated discourse and Arab American life writing by drawing on the theory of framing. I follow the definition of framing as the process of selecting certain aspects of perceived reality in order to instill them with salience and to provide a particular evaluation pattern. Media frames thus constitute interpretative schemata which can be compared to narrative frameworks in literary writing. To delineate the interactive framing process working through social and literary discourse, I develop an integrated framing model by focussing on a set of issue frames including politics, ethnicity, religion and gender. Within the developed theoretical framework, I first trace the nature and transformation of dominant media frames of Arabs and Arab Americans in the past three decades by drawing on empirical framing studies. The interactive functioning of framed discourse and its impact on memory recollection and construction is then provided by a close-reading analysis of life narratives by Arab Americans. Works to be discussed include Children of the Roojme (Abinader 1991), West of Kabul, East of New York (Ansary 2003), and Angeleno Days (Orfalea 2009). Due to its interdisciplinary theoretical approach and methodology, (Re-)Framing the Arab seeks to open up novel research paths to the study of autobiographical writing in general and to a deeper understanding of Arab American identity negotiation in particular. Whereas literary critics in the past have mostly disregarded the impact of mass mediated discourse on the self-creation of Arab American authors, this paper develops a consistent framework to link the fields of empirical media studies and literary analysis. It thus provides a theoretical ground on which to discuss the complex entanglement of public discourse and personal memory (re-)construction in the modern media age.