Self-Literacy

Writing Out Personhood

Alan Bleakley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040364505
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood offers fifty perspectives on gaining an understanding of what 'personhood' may mean through various disciplines. Literature is a key medium through which selves are mapped as humans are written into being. Such literature is intimately tied to health such as within self-help literature, written accounts of illness, or of characters who are defined by their afflictions – physical, psychological, and moral. This book adopts an essay approach to aspects of selfhood, including disciplines of psychology (personality), sociology (social selves), anthropology (cultural selfhood), literary (the self as portrayed in literature), and history (notions of self through time). Each chapter can be read in isolation, and a comprehensive list of works on self is provided as a bibliography. This book will appeal to researchers and postgraduates engaged in the fields of Literature and Health Humanities, as well as psychology, sociology, and anthropology academics and students.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The self, not a given but a problem
• 1 The camouflaged self
• 2 Authentic and inauthentic selves: Duty of candour and whistleblowers
• 3 Ancient Greek practices of self-forming
• 4 Self as flâneur
• 5 Authenticity with muscle: The ancient Greek hero
• 6 Familiars
• 7 Renaissance self-fashioning
• 8 The alchemical self as outlaw: An experiment in embodied metaphor
• 9 Animal or plant self?: Geography matters
• 10 The enlightenment self as ‘subject to’ King and Divinity
• 11 The enlightened self: Beyond subjection
• 12 Unique identifiers: Fingerprints and ears
• 13 Talking yourself up: Illeism
• 14 Possessed and absent selves
• 15 The modern ego: The all-seeing ‘I’
• 16 The origins of ‘self-help’
• 17 The relational self
• 18 Self stripped of rights
• 19 Self engulfed by panic
• 20 The self-righteous narcissist
• 21 Paranoia: Beside oneself
• 22 The translational self: An attractor in a dynamic, complex system
• 23 The narrative construction of self
• 24 Personal confessional narratives constitute a confessional self
• 25 The self’s new religion: Secular and humanistic
• 26 Writing out the modern self: Postmodern prescriptions
• 27 Cancelling the self: Postmodern anti-narrativists
• 28 As mad as a hatter: Neurodivergent selves
• 29 Self-consciousness without consciousness: Tacit knowing
• 30 Bodies at their limits: Intentional self-fashioning
• 31 Wired for subjectivity
• 32 Loneliness
• 33 The fashioning of family
• 34 Feminist selves
• 35 Self as laboratory rat
• 36 The self in pieces: The yips
• 37 Mods
• 38 Politicised junior doctors
• 39 The progressively absent self
• 40 A roof over yourself
• 41 From carbon to silicon
• 42 Différance
• 43 Lacanian subjectivities
• 44 The neurological self
• 45 The linguistic transactional self in surgical settings
• 46 Subject to power/power runs through the subject
• 47 Bodies that are no-bodies: The biological self
• 48 The universal SELF
• 49 Subject to the abject
• 50 The final straw: The self’s last sip of life’s juice
• Appendix: The disposable self as ‘worm’
• Further reading
• Index