| The late twentieth century was witness to a variety of challenges to the tenets of modern humanism and its articulation of the "self." Poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist theories are just some of the vehicles of this critical rethinking. The result has been a reconfiguration of the Cartesian cogito as a decentred, multiple, contingent entity, characterized by both Liminality and hybridity. In so far as this represents an unravelling of the conventional humanist subject, it is possible to identify strong similarities between the late-twentieth- (and early twenty-first) century construction of the individual self and that of the so-called renaissance of the twelfth century wherein the individual was said to have been "(re-) discovered." It was during the cultural and intellectual expansion of this medieval renaissance and in its renewed interest in the inner life or the homo interior that the seeds of the modern subject were sewn. Consequently, these two periods are analogous in that they represent a movement toward or a movement away from what has come to be called the modern, humanist age.;In my diachronic examination of pre- and post-humanist selves, I focus specifically on texts by eight writers (four from each period) that present a liminal, hybrid subject (whether it be autobiographical, biographical, auto- or biofictional, or purely fictional). After presenting the theoretical and discursive framework of my argument, I consider the ways in which the self is presented in the context of the body, transgressive (gender) performance, and trauma or crisis in both the twelfth and late twentieth centuries. |
