Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self

Description

The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the seventeenth century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions of selfhood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume grew skeptical of the self's very existence. Ideas of the self have changed markedly since the Romantic period and most scholars today regard it as at best a mental construct. First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have provided an outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson, novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature. FC Half title Title Copyright Contents 1 The Self and History Giving a Name to the Self: Terminology and Disciplines Giving Voice to the “I”: Memoir, Autobiography, Diary The Diary in Japan 2 The Soul from Animism to Monotheism The Axial Age: Doctrines of Self and No-Self The Worship of One God The Invention of the Inner Self: Augustine of Hippo The Pride of Saying “I”: Chandrakirti and Shantideva Mystical Visions: Hildegard of Bingen Unveiling Inner Secrets: Ruzbihan Baqli 3 Exercising the Soul and Mind Humanism and Individualism: The Renaissance in Italy Righteousness and Reform: Martin Luther The Counter-Reformation: Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila What Do I Know?: Michel de Montaigne The Sufi’s “I”: Mughal and Ottoman Memoirs and Diaries 4 Self-Examination A Staff to Hold Me Up: English Puritan Diaries Edifying Narratives: John Bunyan and George Fox A City on the Hill: The Puritan Diary in New England The Unequalled Self: Samuel Pepys The Truth of Matter of Fact: Robert Hooke 5 Reasons of the Mind and Heart I Am Thinking, Therefore I Exist: René Descartes The Self is Hateful: Blaise Pascal Self as a Forensic Term: John Locke The Justice and Reasonableness of God: Jonathan Edwards 6 The Soul Dethroned Personal Identity is Fictitious: David Hume To Change the Common Way of Thinking: Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie And Who Are You?: The Self in the Eighteenth-Century Novel A Little Speculation on the Human Mind: James Boswell A Copernican Revolution: Immanuel Kant 7 Rousseau and Romanticism The Feeling of Existence: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Dreams of a Spirit-Seer: Emanuel Swedenborg Each Human Being has His Own Measure: Hamann, Herder, Goethe What Am I to Call My Self?: The Romantic Movement in England 8 Revolution and Reaction The Study of Myself: Pierre Maine de Biran Society is Too Powerful: Benjamin Constant A Man at War With Society: Stendhal What is this “I”: Delacroix, Vigny, Amiel 9 Idealism and Irrationalism The Individual is a Matter of Indifference: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel Will as Irrational Impulse: Arthur Schopenhauer What It Means to Live as a Human Being: Søren Kierkegaard The Freedom to Be Irrational: Fyodor Dostoyevsky 10 The Individual and the Crowd Self-Reliance and Self-Transcendence: Ralph Waldo Emerson To Be What We Are: Henry David Thoreau The Separate Person and the Word En-Masse: Walt Whitman 11 Doubting the Soul and Discovering of the Body A Machine for Grinding General Laws: Charles Darwin Naturalizing the “I”: Nineteenth-Century Psychology and Sociology Diary as Document Humain: the Goncourt Brothers and Marie Bashkirtseff The Revaluation of All Values: Friedrich Nietzsche 12 Evolution and Affirmation The Most Puzzling Puzzle: William James Supramental Evolution: Sri Aurobindo Secrets of the Self: Muhammad Iqbal The Human Phenomenon: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Dare to be Yourself: André Gide 13 The Search for Authenticity A Self of One’s Own: Marion Milner Letting Go: Thomas Merton Living and Dying Authentically: Phenomenology and Existentialism 14 The Death of the Subject To Dissolve Man: Claude Lévi-Strauss The Death of the Author: Roland Barthes To Free Oneself of the Inner Life: Alain Robbe-Grillet The Disappearance of Man: Michel Foucault The Myth of the Subjective: Anglo-American Philosophy and Neuroscience 15 Long Live the Self Technologies of the Self, Then and Now Diaries and Memoirs on the Eve of the Internet Revolution The Self in the Age of Digital Reproduction Notes Bibliography Index