Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove

Of a rather extended family or ways we engage with literary works, one constitutes an occasion for self reflection of a distinctive kind. The relational conception of selfhood as developed in American pragmatic thought, viewed against the Cartesian picture of the self, allows us to see the way in which the comparisons we make between ourselves and literary characters yields self-knowledge. And more strongly, the relational conception of experience derived from pragmatism allows us to see the way in which autobiographical or reflexively-engaged literary experience itself becomes self-constitutive. In short, the self-negotiated profiles of our own identities are both sharpened by, and indeed in part constituted by, literary engagement. If we are in part composed of relations, the selves that enter those imaginary worlds do not remain unchanged.