Stories of the Self (Level 5)

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Professor Joanne Leal
• Tutors: Professor Joanne Leal, Ann Lewis, John Kraniauskas
• Assessment: two essays of 2000 words each (50%) and one three-hour unseen examination (50%)

This course will enable you to explore issues relating to identity formation and the construction of selfhood and investigate their representation in a variety of cultural media. Within each topic, you will be encouraged to examine a text or group of texts as representing a case study of one or more dimensions of these concerns.

Some topics take as their point of focus genre-specific dimensions of the construction of stories of the self within different cultural media, allowing you to understand the different possibilities available for self-exploration within autobiography, prose fiction, drama, film etc. Other topics examine the way in which stories of the self are constructed in relation to concepts such as nation, gender, class etc., enabling you to understand the interconnections between these concepts and their place in the construction of narratives of the self.

Indicative module content

Dreaming the Self in Eighteenth-Century Philosophical Fiction. In this section, we will examine Diderot's Le Reve de d'Alembert (1769) and Rousseau's Reveries (1776-78). These texts, written by two towering figures of the French Enlightenment, deploy innovative and experimental literary forms - structured around the conceit of the dream or 'reverie' - to examine key philosophical questions regarding the constitution of selfhood or identity. (These include, for example, the relation of the individual self to the other of society, of one's past to one's present, and the relation between 'thought', body and soul.) By using fragmentary forms, each text explores, and questions, the idea of a 'unified self'.

Doubting and Discovering the Self: German Romantic Prose in Philosophical Context. We will examine both literary and philosophical challenges to traditional ideas of the self in the context of the revolution in German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. The focus of the sessions will be two remarkably modern literary representations of the problem of personal identity in Goethe's Werther and Kleist's 'The Marquise of O', both of which continue to inspire debate. The texts will also be studied in the light of brief extracts from representative philosophical and psychoanalytic texts (e.g. by Hume, Kant and Freud) of which photocopies will be provided.

Fiction or non-fiction - finding the self in 20th-century French writing (Perec and Modiano). In the wake of A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust's great novel of time and selfhood, French writers have struggled to find new ways to tell their own stories of the self. This section examines two very different novelists who experiment with narrative forms in order to give their incomplete, yet curiously authentic renditions of the self in a postmodern, post-Proustian world.

Max Frisch and the fictional self. In this section we will examine Swiss writer Max Frisch's complex exploration of the nature of selfhood through the construction of an interrelated network of fictional personas across a number of texts, some apparently insisting on the authenticity of autobiography, others illustrating that the only authentic self is the one that accepts its status as a fiction.

The Revolutionary Subject: Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. In this part of the course we will critically consider: (a) how Guevara represents the process of armed revolutionary struggle, particularly his own role in it in both Cuba and Bolivia, and (b) how Guevara's first-hand accounts have subsequently been translated into film.