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“... ambitious, amounting to an alternative account of what Charles Taylor calls the ‘sources of the self’. Like Taylor, Yovel is a philosophy professor, and his starting point is a philosophical account of modernity: Hegel, the philosopher of modernity par excellence, placed the gist of the modern era in the rise of the principle of subjectivity (the ...”

“... extreme difficulty, of writing a novel worth reading. This seems to be in part everyday fear of self-exposure, for which, in interviews, she tends to blame a hypercritical mother, and in part ambivalence about seeking a mass audience. On top of that, she has a nasty case of belatedness with regard to her favourite writers – they include ...”

“... 1430s and often described as the first autobiography in English – as a powerful assertion of her self in the world. The self Margery describes is different from our modern understanding of that word, however, and not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman shows ...”

“... The whole point of these devices – the reason they work, insofar as they do – is they make you self-conscious about how you’re behaving, and prompt you to behave differently. They notice your being virtuous, where no one else notices (or cares), and so prompt you to be more so. Being self-conscious about how well ...”

“... There is a school of psychologists who suggest that the real person is not an elusive self au-dessus de la mêlée but simply the sum of the roles that he plays: we are like actors who never come off-stage, and no interview after the performance can reveal our true selves. If this view leaves us too hollow-centred, at least it stretches us to ...”

“... is likely to throw more light on the normally ageing autobiographer than on the earlier self about whom the book is ostensibly written.’ Finney describes this critical commonplace, very plausibly, as the ‘intrinsic paradox of the genre’, and proportions his praise of autobiographers to the degree to which they show themselves aware of it. His ...”

“... person, his ankles tangling in the unwinding wool from a ball with which he has been playing. This self-contained episode, which yet reverberates throughout all the ensuing action, is so replete with Freudian symbolism – knitting wool/navel string, sexy dance/primal scene, and oh, that phallic herring! – that one expects a transformation scene as ...”

“... threatens to become all too familiar, however, thinking about the human impulse to distinguish self from not-self can still help to decode our political and cultural arrangements. The ‘primordial’ category need not be simple. De Beauvoir’s own appropriation of the Other for feminist purposes had much to do with ...”

“... to Hawkes, O’Connor admitted that ‘the devil teaches most of the lessons that lead to self-knowledge.’ In the years since, critics have abandoned a Catholic interpretation of her work in favour of a psychological and secular approach. If this amounts to a betrayal of O’Connor’s ‘anagogical vision’, perhaps that’s no bad thing: her ...”

“... by others. We can have it only at the price of a disavowal: although I know very well that my self-esteem depends on serotonin, I nonetheless enjoy it. Fukuyama writes: The normal, and morally acceptable, way of overcoming low self-esteem was to struggle with oneself and with others, to work hard, to endure sometimes ...”

“... makes clear, what enabled this strange chemistry to get going was a mixture of uneasiness and self-assurance about class that the poets recognised and warmed to in each another. Shelley, according to Byron, was ‘as perfect a Gentleman as ever crossed a drawing room’, but his background was only precariously genteel. Grandfather Bysshe twice eloped ...”

“... England’s shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was still engaged in forging itself – as, indeed, it still is – and novelists saw themselves as the chief chroniclers of that process, in full ...”

“... I offer it a stomach that by now can only manage honeydew and cantaloupe; I offer it hunched self, hair-fall. My baby tooth. Ugly World to Empath Your spinal reflex, coddling at its base the warmest ever spot, so tiny, says: withdraw. It feeds your despair through the reed of the street-player’s clarinet. It is the mirror neuron, which looks at the ...”

“... studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its operation, but seemingly indifferent to ...”

“... upper emotional register. Despite every opportunity of scene and action, it never does. He is too self-aware, or perhaps too fastidious, to abandon himself to a coloratura line. Instead, he chills Asya’s character to the point where he as narrator can safely handle it: ‘When in later life people said she was cold, she never disagreed. For she knew, and ...”