Beyond Tradition III: The Modern Crisis of Self: The Discovery [Invention] of Interiority

Interiority is a distinctly modern invention, emerging from diverse economic, social, and cultural forces, first in the form of a particular moral and religious inwardness but culminating now in what seems to be a kind of terminal narcissism—an obsessive fascination with self and the “inner mechanism” (as Iris Murdoch puts it). In the seminar, we try to trace this historical trajectory, from Kierkegaard’s ideas of “inwardness” and “truth as subjectivity,” through Freud’s theories of narcissism, repression, and the unconscious—together with Philip Rieff’s penetrating analysis of “psychological man”—and concluding with Christopher Lasch’s blistering (if perhaps now somewhat dated) critique of the “culture of narcissism.” In the tutorial, we read three classic novels of interiority, exemplifying what has been called the “inward turn” in narrative (Erich Kahler): Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Albert Camus’s The Fall.This class is the third in the “Beyond Tradition” sequence but does not presuppose familiarity with either authors or themes from the previous two classes. It should appeal to anyone who knows someone with narcissistic issues.Please read the whole of the Kierkegaard selection for the first meeting: get what you can from it; skip what irritates or confounds you, in addition to the Hamsun reading.

Notes

Online registration deadline: Thurs, Mar 16, 5PM CT