Abstract This essay responds to Richard Handler’s work on individual identity construction in Jane Austen’s novels. Handler describes the mode of identity construction in Austen as a process of public recognition of similarity to others in society, and argues that this was the dominant mode of identity construction in Austen’s time. An analysis of the… Continue reading Evert Jan van Leeuwen | Public Similarity or Private Difference: Genre, and the Construction of Individual Identity in Jane Austen and Charles Brockden Brown
Category: 17.2/3 Diversen
David Herman | From Narrative Narcissism to Distributed Intelligence
Abstract This essay focuses on ways in which the final episode of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (sometimes called “the ricorso”) exhibits a deep, constitutive reflexivity. At issue is a propensity for self-characterization that surfaces in repeated specifications of Joyce’s text by the text itself. Despite the chapter’s reflexive (and more specifically recursive) profile, however, my… Continue reading David Herman | From Narrative Narcissism to Distributed Intelligence