| This dissertation is on the use of non-narrative constructions of identity. Since Galen Strawson's article "Against Narrativity" of 2004, the narrative approach to identity creation has been under attack; however, as of yet, no other option has been fully explored. My dissertation examines the history of non-narrative approaches to identity creation, which I argue stretch back to the beginning of the last century in Central Europe. After the so-called crisis of the self in the late nineteenth century, Central European novelists, in particular Rainer Maria Rilke, Witold Gombrowicz, and Bohumil Hrabal, used the Kantian faculty for reflective judgment in fashioning an identity that could overcome anxieties about mechanization, the growth of the unknowable self in the subconscious, the influence of others, and the violent incursions of history. Hrabal ultimately offers the most productive example of self-fashioning in his Too Loud a Solitude, with which I end the dissertation, through his aesthetics of pressing, a process similar to constructing a collage. Collage then becomes a new method for understanding one's identity, not in terms of a narrative progression, but as a larger collection of events and experiences that creates the totality of an individual. |
