This seminar will explore notions of personhood and selfhood as they are dramatized in works of 19.- and 20.-c. European fiction, especially in texts that stage the formation of an “I” in relation to an other, and to a resistant social world. Attention will be paid to how these works thematize writing as a technique for what philosopher Ian Hacking calls “making up people.” Readings from philosophy and psychoanalysis that address questions of personhood and selfhood in literature and culture (Nietzsche, Simmel, Foucault, Freud, Lacan). Novels by Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, Fleur Jaeggy.
