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Kundera's Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self

Kundera's Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self Milan Kundera's novel Immortality bears a close relation to contemporary social science debates about the production of the self. Commentators like Kleinman and Mishler seem to have introduced a new version of authenticity based on a reinvention of the Romantic subject with the interview (as the medium) and the narrative (as the content) portrayed as the means for constructing and sharing biographical expenence. Unlike such contem porary Romantics, Kundera examines how the subject is constructed in literary biography and mass media "imagology." The authors show how Kundera's work leads in two possible directions: an analysis of the interview society and a concern with strategies for the invention of the self. By locating styles of the self, the authors reveal lively and skillful biographical work, overlooked by cultural critique and not reducible to any structural determinism. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qualitative Inquiry SAGE

Kundera's Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self

Qualitative Inquiry , Volume 3 (3): 22 – Sep 1, 1997

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References (54)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
Copyright © by SAGE Publications
ISSN
1077-8004
eISSN
1552-7565
DOI
10.1177/107780049700300304
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Milan Kundera's novel Immortality bears a close relation to contemporary social science debates about the production of the self. Commentators like Kleinman and Mishler seem to have introduced a new version of authenticity based on a reinvention of the Romantic subject with the interview (as the medium) and the narrative (as the content) portrayed as the means for constructing and sharing biographical expenence. Unlike such contem porary Romantics, Kundera examines how the subject is constructed in literary biography and mass media "imagology." The authors show how Kundera's work leads in two possible directions: an analysis of the interview society and a concern with strategies for the invention of the self. By locating styles of the self, the authors reveal lively and skillful biographical work, overlooked by cultural critique and not reducible to any structural determinism.

Journal

Qualitative InquirySAGE

Published: Sep 1, 1997

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