Talking with one's selves: Contemporary autobiography beyond self-identity

This dissertation compares recent American and Austrian novels that represent the multiple voices populating postmodern consciousness not as a tragic fall from psychic unity, but as a new opportunity for self-re-creation. I argue that by understanding the self as an aggregate of different perspectives and voices, it becomes possible to recognize identity construction as a dialogic and even polyphonic process. Traditional forms of autobiography, however, often struggle to express the dialogic nature of consciousness insofar as their chronologically consistent narratives privilege a diachronically co-incident self. Indeed, depicting the interaction of these various internal voices often assumes secondary importance to the accurate portrayal of external dialogue and events. Innovative postmodern autobiographers confront this generic difficulty directly by not only telling the stories of their lives from many perspectives at once, but by creating different versions of the same events. Just as no single voice can ever completely dominate a dialogic consciousness, no single autobiographical narrative can ultimately account for the openendedness of an individual's life. Talking with One's Selves shows that a polyphonic self requires a polyphonic autobiography.;In my first chapter, I argue that the intertextual voices in William Gaddis's Agape Agape force the novel's narrator to recognize that he can never be happily self-identical. Having lifted these voices from the works of the great Austrian author Thomas Bernhard, Gaddis's narrator can no longer claim ultimate ownership of his thoughts. My second chapter shows how inner speech can become truly polyphonic by transcending what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the 'vicious circle of microdialogue'. In my third and fourth chapters, I locate this multipartite self in the works of Peter Handke and Raymond Federman. I demonstrate that their narrative constructions of self depend on the collaborative dialogue between past, present, and future selves. These representations of an aggregate subjectivity accomplish two important goals: they teach us to think of postmodern consciousness as a complex unity that Mikhail Bakhtin describes as a 'dialogic concordance of unmerged twos and multiples,' and they represent a new literary genre that synthesizes novelistic openness with the autobiography's emphasis on inner life.