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- Title
Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Inquiry: A Reply to George Butte.
- Authors
Eakin, Paul John
- Abstract
In my essay "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?" I investigate narrative identity, the idea that what we are could be said to be a story of some kind. Attracted by neurologist Antonio Damasio's belief that both self and narrative are deeply rooted in our lives in and as bodies, I explore the possibilities of a neurobiological approach to self-representation in autobiography. Integral to consciousness is reflexive awareness, the sense we have that we not only participate in but witness our experience. As Walt Whitman puts it in "Song of Myself," we are 'both in and out of the game.' We embody this doubleness of our first-person perspective in the I-narrators who tell the stories of our I-character selves. Yet neurologically speaking, the free-standing observer/teller figure that is so central a feature of both autobiographical discourse and the life it describes cannot be extrapolated from the general matrix of consciousness. There is no site-specific location for self in the brain, no phrenological bump, no homunculus to house the reality of our phenomenological experience of selfhood.
- Subjects
AUTOBIOGRAPHY; IDENTITY (Philosophical concept); NARRATION; SELF; CONSCIOUSNESS; BIOGRAPHY (Literary form)
- Publication
Narrative, 2005, Vol 13, Issue 3, p307
- ISSN
1063-3685
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1353/nar.2005.0019