Title: Self as narrative
First published: 1996
Description: Remembrance and self-reflection are narrative acts in which we create, rather than simply retrieve, our personal pasts and hence our conceptions of who we are. Self as Narrative considers the human capacity to evaluate, modify, and utilize the discursive codes and conventions of a plurality of communal contexts in the creation of meaningful narratives of selfhood.

This book represents a genuinely original extension of an important area of theoretical debate and includes relevant applications of the ideas developed to some works of contemporary fiction, arguing for the importance of contemporary fiction as an arena of moral debate.

The author emphasizes the intersubjective nature and creative possibilities of communicative praxis, and invites reconsideration of concepts such as authorship, the self, and moral responsibility in the wake of the postmodern 'dissolution of the subject'.

The author offers a possible point of contact between postmodernists and communitarians, one which has significance for the current multicultural and post-colonialism debates relevant to the analysis of the three writers discussed in the second part of this book: Atwood, Banville, and Coetzee.
Subjects: History, Theory, Postmodernism (Literature), 20th century, Communalism in literature, Subjectivity in literature, Narration (Rhetoric), English fiction, Self in literature, Identity (Psychology) in literature, Memory in literature, Fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, History and criticism
People: J. M. Coetzee (1940-), John Banville, Margaret Eleanor Atwood (1939-)
Time periods: 20th century, History and criticism
LC classification: PR888.S427 W67 1996