Self as narrative

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.