scholarly journals Textual Revision and the Historicity of the Self: Some Factual Inaccuracies in The Prelude

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soheil Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Reasonable Expectation ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Textual Revision

Abstract Reading Wordsworth’s Prelude implicates us immediately in the politics of autobiographical writing — which deliberately elides, to use Felicity Nussbaum’s words, “the subject’s fragmentations and discontinuities.” But at the same time, one cannot help suspecting that the seemingly reasonable expectation of factual correctness in autobiography can also mask a deep denial of these essential fragmentations and discontinuities in the name of truth. Wordsworth’s revisions of the Prelude afford an insightful means of understanding these issues: here the imperatives of narrative self-constitution far outweigh the imperatives of literal facts. But the misdating of crucial events — such as the composition of the Glad Preamble — do not detract from its validity as autobiographical writing, but rather gives evidence of the self-problematising nature of origins. In fact, the interest in works such as the Prelude lies not in how closely they adhere to historical particularities, but how tenaciously their metaphoric transcendence resists reduction back to these historical particularities. Romantic subjectivity makes no clear distinction between self and the outer world of phenomena — and also it seems between self and self. This becomes abundantly clear in Wordsworth’s appropriation of Dorothy’s experience. In the Prelude this process is traceable eminently through the process of textual revisions as the present study argues.

Self as One and Many Narratives

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Joseph Ulatowski ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
One And Many ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Work And Life

There are different approaches to the narrative self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have an important role to play in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself. I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life. I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight into the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves. This paper mines a vein of research on narratives for insights into selves without being bewitched into accepting implausible conclusions.

scholarly journals Translating the Self in Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir

2017 ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Doaa Embabi
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Arabic And English ◽  
East West

This paper examines the link between the notion of ‘cultural translation,’ initially introduced by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), and autobiographical writing by a translingual writer: Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place (1999). As an ArabAmerican intellectual, Said culminates his writing career with a memoir, in which he represents the educational years of his life. Said shows through the narrative that the interplay between Arabic and English language and cultures strongly infl uenced the formation of his identity. Thus, this paper explores reading his memoir as an attempt at ‘cultural translation’ according to which difference is not necessarily trapped in binary oppositions of self/other; East/West; home/foreign land – to name only a few. Difference in this context rather opens a possibility for more fluid boundaries allowing for negotiation and change.

‘The Very Complexion of the Mirror’

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Mhairi Pooler
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Self ◽  
World War ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Reflective Surface ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Mixed Genre ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First World

The introduction’s title is taken from a quote by Henry James that underlines the book’s focus on the self-theorising artist: the idea that autobiographical writing shows the author’s mirrored reflection as well as an examination of the reflective surface itself. This idea is introduced alongside other key themes of the book, including the concern with genre, especially the mixed genre of ‘creative autobiography’ and how it compares with the Künstlerroman. The choice of authors studied and their interconnections are explained. It is described how each of the works focused on is a response to the moment of its composition – to the new century, to the shock of the First World War, to the experiments in self-expression or to the uncertainty of the interwar years – making Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of the ‘historical horizon’ important to the study. This discussion dwells on Virginia Woolf’s idea that ‘human character changed’ in 1910.

Jean Quigley, The grammar of autobiography: A developmental account. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Pp. xiv, 232. Hb $49.95.

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-493
Author(s):  
Stanton Wortham
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Functional Linguistics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In The grammar of autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays: that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two dimensions of the work distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms – modals – as the key to narrative self-construction.

Psychopharmacology and the Self

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrik Svenaeus
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Psychotropic Effects ◽  
Embodied Self

Psychopharmacological drugs have effects on selfhood in ways that often overlap with the treatment of mental disorders, but the effects also go beyond the domain of disorder into the sphere of enhancement. To what extent this is and will be the case depends, of course, on the definition and understanding of mental disorder. The psychotropic effects on selfhood can be mapped out by distinguishing groups of traits that belong to personality and that form dimensions of selfhood, but they can also be distinguished by acknowledging different layers of selfhood-pre-reflective embodied self, reflective self, and narrative self. The effects of psychopharmacological drugs in some cases normalize the alienating experiences of the breakdown of pre-reflective selfhood, in other cases they rather bring about changes in basic dimensions of selfhood and personality, such as temperament and emotional dispositions.

The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional : The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (5) ◽  
pp. 980-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Miles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Fragmented Self ◽  
The World

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.

Mythical Time, Historical Time, and The Narrative Fabric of the Self

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Time Experience ◽  
Life Itself

Despite the belief that narrative may serve as an important vehicle for exploring human experience and selfhood, there frequently exists the paradoxical supposition that narrative accounts cannot help but falsify life itself: Insofar as time is viewed in fundamentally linear terms and experience, in turn, is viewed as that which simply "goes on" in time, narratives may be viewed as entailing an imposition of literary form upon that which is ostensibly formless. After considering the idea of mythical time, tied to the image of the circle, and the idea of historical time, tied to the image of the line, it is suggested that human experience and selfhood are themselves woven out of the fabric of narrative. In light of contemporary understandings of the self, particularly those promoted in certain quarters of post-structuralist and social constructionist thought, it is further suggested that the narrative fabric of the self has become frayed. By rethinking the interrelationship of time, experience, and self via the idea of narrative, there emerges the opportunity to recognize more fully the profound continuities between myth and history as well as life and literature. (Hermeneutics, History, Myth, Narrative, Self, Time)

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