/tag/self-representation

9 quotes tagged 'self-representation'

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

109-110

Originally persona signified 'mask': the mask that ancient actors wore in playing a given part, in incarnating a given personage. Thereby the mask possessed something typical, nonindividual, especially in the case of divine masks and even more clearly when used in many archaic rites. At this point I can resume and apply the ideas of the preceding chapter about the dual structure of the being: the 'person' is that which the man presents concretely and sensibly in the world, in the position he occupies, but always signifying a form of expression and manifestation of a higher principle in which the true center of being is to be recognized, and on which falls, or should fall, the accent of the Self. \nA 'mask' is something very precise, delineated, and structured. So man as person (= mask) is already differentiated thereby from the mere individual; he has a form, is himself, and belongs to himself. Consequently, whenever a civilization has had a traditional character, the values of the 'person' have made of it a world of quality, diversity, and types. And the natural consequence has been a system of organic, differentiated, and hierarchical relationships: something that cannot be said of mass regimes, but also not of regimes of individualism, of 'values of the personality,' or of real or pretended democracy. \nLike the individual, the person itself is in a certain sense closed to the external world, and in relation to it, all the existential situations whose legitimacy we have already recognized can be of value in the present age. Unlike the individual, the person is not closed to the above. The personal being is not himself, but has himself (like the relation between the actor and his part): it is presence to that which he is, not coalescence with that which he is. Moreover, a kind of antinomy is brought to light: in order to be truly such, the person needs a reference to something more than personal. When this reference is absent, the person transforms itself into an 'individual,' and individualism and subjectivism come into play.\n

The Bakhtin Reader

Author: Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, Pam Morris (Editor)

Publisher: Arnold (2001)

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

155-156

[Margo] Jefferson believes that the 'problem' of memoir is 'figuring out how to examine and dramatize ourselves without forgetting to pay the same attention to the larger historical and spiritual forces that have made us.' This, she argues, The Kiss does not do. Harrison's book, she concludes, is of a piece with the publicity surrounding it: 'In the end, you have to treat 'The Kiss' as if it were performance art, with the book, the reviews, the interviews, the editorials and the readers' responses all spread across some vast media gallery.

137

From time to time, in a spirit of formal innovation, critics have south to free autobiography from its perennial allegiance to biography's concern with narrative chronology, as though narrative's primacy in self-accounting were merely a matter of literary convention. As I have shown in this chapter, however, narrative's role in self-representation extends well beyond the literary; it is not merely one form among many in which to express identity, but rather an integral part of a primary mode of identity experience, that of the extended self, the self in time. If my reading of narrative's place in life writing is correct, to move beyond narrative would involve not merely a shift in literary form but a more fundamental change in the culturally sanctioned narrative practices that function as the medium in which the extended self and autobiographical memory emerge.

129-130

Certainly a continuing refrain in the clinical accounts of amnesiacs and autistics is the clinician's distress over the subject's apparent loss of affect, confirming that one of the important adaptive functions of narrative identity and the exchange of identity narratives is the enhancement of bonding and social solidarity. Sacks's remark testifies to the working of social accountability: to achieve a socially recognized identity, individuals need to display 'that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a 'self' for the rest of us.

100-101

...narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self - the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. I have always been convinced that narrative occupies a central and determining place in the autobiographical enterprise, but I now make a much bolder claim for its function in self-representation. ...I asked whether the self could be said to be narratively structured. I concluded that self and story were 'complementary, mutually constituting aspects of a single process of identity formation' (Touching 198). \r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nNarrative and identity are preformed simultaneously...in a single act of self-narration; the self in question is a self defined by and transacted in narrative process. What is arresting about this radical equation between narrative and identity is the notion that narrative here is not merely about the self but rather in some profound way a constituent part of self - of the self, I should be careful to specify, that is expressed in self-narrations, for narrative is not (and cannot be) coextensive with all of selfhood, given the multiple registers of selfhood, about which I will say more in a moment. It follows that the writing of autobiography is properly understood as an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation in which acts of self-narration play a major part.

In contrast to the unmediated, direct perception of the ecological and interpersonal selves, the reflexiveness that distinguishes Neisser's extended, private, and conceptual selves is much like the 'consciousness of consciousness' that distinguishes Edelman's higher consciousness from primary consciousness. Following the acquisition of language and the entry into symbol-making activity that accompanies it, the child now engages in the 'self-representations' that these modes of selfhood predicate. Development of these selves is normally shaped and fostered in a concerted way at home and school by the adults of the child's immediate culture. These are the selves familiar to traditional autobiographers, who relate the story of the extended and private selves by drawing on their culture's store of conceptual selves.

The Functions of Event Memory: Some Comments on Nelson and Barsalou (in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory)

Author: Robyn Fivush

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1988)