Soi-disant: Writing, Screening, Theorizing the Self in French

Abstract

This paper explores the construction of identity, particularly with reference to texts (literary, philosophic, popular and cinematic) in French, as an introduction to a volume of papers on the topic. We demonstrate that the papers presented in that collection will show the effects on the reading of the self both of inertia and of deliberate modification with respect to convention. In publishing them as a collection, we make no claims to be unveiling a theoretization of the self, c. 2003, which would rise from the ashes of its predecessors. Rather, and despite the recurrence of certain patterns and concerns, we present a corpus that nuances the story of the fragmentation of the coherent self. What emerges from the juxtaposition of these texts is the importance of genre in determining the version of identity presented. That is to say, the instance of the subject, whether the “je‿ of the text or the focus of narrative identification, is largely determined by generic conventions for writing/producing the self and for formulating identity.