Literary representations of fragmented or disjointed selves are often understood as reflections of broader social disintegration. The “solitary, asocial” modernist protagonist was, for Lukács, a product of early twentieth-century technological and industrial innovations that transformed each individual into “a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments” (1955), and even Tristram Shandy, whose self-professed discursiveness made it an outlier in the eighteenth century, has been reinterpreted as representing a “devastating loss of faith in wholeness or continuity” endemic to Sterne’s general historical moment (Keymer 1998). Today, scholars tend to associate the current popularity of fragmented fiction with the ubiquitous internet (Nünning & Scherr 2018). At the same time, however, it is largely taken for granted that "there is no essential, original, coherent, autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating” (Smith 1995). 

If the self is fragmented all the way down, and if its (illusory?) coherence and integrity are possible only through narrativization, should we think again, and perhaps differently, about the nature of fragmented selves in fiction? Our proposed seminar thus issues the following provocation: could it be that the much-discussed fragmentation of self is not solely a symptom of or reaction to external conditions but, rather, an attempt to make visible an internal process of self-narrativization, or, conversely, a deliberate attempt to resist that process? 

To explore this broad question, we invite proposals on any aspect of self-fragmentation without placing any limitations on narrative genre or medium, historical or geographical context, or methodology. Indeed, our discussions and potential future collaborations will depend on bringing together a wide variety of new perspectives. Along the way, we will almost certainly confront kindred questions, including those pertaining to the relationship between narrative form and models of selfhood.

Works Cited

Keymer, Thomas. “Narratives of Loss: The Poems of Ossian and Tristram Shandy.” From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations, ed. Stafford & Gaskill, Brill, 1998, 79-96.   

Lukács, Georg. “The Ideology of Modernism.” The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. Mander & Mander, Merlin, 1963, 17-46.

Nünning, Ansgar, and Alexander Scherr. “The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age.” Anglia  136.3 (2018): 482-507.

Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” a/b: Auto/Biography            Studies 10.1 (1995): 17-33.