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It has been fashionable to declare that there is no self. Certainly the notion of the unitary subject—a transcendent subject linked to the traditional religious idea of the immortal soul—has not had currency in academic discourse for a very long time, perhaps as much as a century and a half. The psychologically unified subject and the universal subject of shared experience are also things of the past. But is there nothing left of the experience of selfhood? For the self can disenchant itself. But what does the subject feel about itself once it begins to doubt its own integrity? How does it experience its own “decentering”? How does this “who” that is left define itself, for itself? For selfhood is an existential condition, and no matter how elusive the self is to itself, it does not and cannot wholly lose itself. This book analyzes how the Gnostics, the Romantics, Kierkegaard, Beckett, and Ashbery dramatize the self’s self-doubt and what follows. The shared theme of these works, disparate as they are, is the bewilderment of selfhood, the pathos of subjectivity. The self encounters its own selfhood as puzzling and paradoxical. It wants to possess the qualities of an ideal self—to be whole, independent, and free—and it is disappointed to find it does not. Yet after the skeptical dismantling, something remains within, which represents itself as the self and continues to hear the (unfulfillable) call to selfhood. The self can neither become a self, nor cease to be agitated by the desire to become one.
“This is a splendid, exacting study, tracking and probing the texture of the self inone acute reading after another. Ranging from the Romantics to poetry closer toour historical home, this book provides a superb account of the literary dynamicsand stakes of Gnosticism in its variegated aftermath. On this terrain, Quinneysurpasses Harold Bloom in clarity, precision, and often in explanatory power.An altogether first-rate achievement.” —Ian Balfour, Professor Emeritus of English,York University, Canada.
“This book recognizes a homely and familiar paradox: that we postmodernists knowvery well the factitiousness of the “self,” yet we continue to behave as though wehave one. Quinney’s learned and brilliant exploration of the subject’s experienceof its fragility deepens our sense of the lineages of the self’s dis-ease, and accountsfor the “Romantic” effects that emanate from the coolest of post-modern texts.”—Karen Swann, Morris Professor of Rhetoric, Emerita, Williams College, USA.
“The self is both a problem, and a paradox. I cannot escape myself; but at the sametime, I cannot grasp, or coincide with, or fulfill my own potentialities. In this beautifulbook, Laura Quinney richly and sensitively explores the paradoxes of selfhood througha wide variety of texts.” —Steven Shaviro, Emeritus Professor of English, Wayne StateUniversity, USA.“When Laura Quinney takes up the loss of the Subject in a range of ancient andmodern writers, she has in mind not primarily the death or disappearance habituallyheralded by literary theory, but rather the feeling of loss that arises within the self bythe light of these developments. Quinney’s legendary concision makes this brief booka prolegomenon for a startling new synthesis of Deconstruction and Humanism.”—Professor Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University, USA.
Laura Quinney teaches English and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. She is the author of Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery, and William Blake on Self and Soul.