What does it mean to write “I” in postmodern society, in a world in which technological advances and increased globalization have complicated notions of authenticity, origins, and selfhood? Under what circumstances and to what extent do authors lend their scriptural authority to fictional counterparts? What role does naming, or, conversely, anonymity play vis-à-vis the writing and written “I”? What aspects of identity are subject to (auto)fictional manipulations? And how do these complicated and multilayered narrating selves problematize the reader’s engagement with the text?
Seeking answers to these questions, Protean Selves brings together essays which explore the intricate relations between language, self, identity, otherness, and the world through the analysis of the forms and uses of the first-person voice. Written by specialists of a variety of approaches and authors from across the world, the studies in this volume follow up a number of critical inquiries on the thorny problematic of self-representation and the representation of the self in contemporary French and francophone literatures, and extend the theoretical analysis to narratives and authors who have gained increasing commercial and academic visibility in the twenty-first century.
