The Language of the Self: A Hermeneutical Study of the Role of Language and Narration in Self-Understanding and Personal Identity.

Abstract

<p>What I shall consider in this thesis is the degree to which language structure and usage must be considered if we wish to grasp the nature of that being we term the 'self' - the subject that I am, and that others presumably are. Stated in its strongest terms, the view I wish to explore is not simply that the medium of our understanding of the self is language, but the further and more control controversial claim that this self is constituted in and through language usage~ and More particularly through self-narration.</p> <p>The thesis is intended as an elucidation and integration of various 20th century reactions to the modernist, and essentially Cartesian, conceptions of the self, self-understanding, and personal identity. At this level of analysis the thesis will be fairly eclectic, ranging through phenomenology, literary theory, deconstruction, semiotics and psychoanalysis. The goal and systematic aim of this survey, however, is to develop on the basis of these investigations what I take to be a properly hermeneutic view of the self and self identity.</p> <p>The contribution to knowledge afforded by the present enterprise lies in its synthesizing of the disparate trends in contemporary thought into a plausible and provocative account of the human subject in relation to language.</p>