Self in the laboratory of the humanities

From the Culture of the I to the Culture of the Self by Roma Sendyka is an outstanding, innovative review of research into various notions of subjectivity. Sendyka uses the inflected form of the reflexive pronoun self (Pl. siebie) as a literary theoretical category, and selected literary autobiographical essayistic texts as peculiar laboratories in order to investigate its cognitive potential. The author reviews a variety of the concepts of self derived from diverse disciplines and philosophical idioms. She juxtaposes the model of self which is manifestly contingent, episodic and circular (with its ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ movement) and the autonomistic, diachronic and narrative model. The perspective of the culture of self reveals rebellious, subversive and so far ‘invisible’ texts, important for the notion of autocreation.