Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood

by Alan Bleakley

Overview

Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood offers fifty perspectives on gaining an understanding of what ‘personhood’ may mean through various disciplines. Literature is a key medium through which selves are mapped as humans are written into being. Such literature is intimately tied to health such as within self-help literature, written accounts of illness, or of characters who are defined by their afflictions – physical, psychological, and moral. This book adopts an essay approach to aspects of selfhood, including disciplines of psychology (personality), sociology (social selves), anthropology (cultural selfhood), literary (the self as portrayed in literature), and history (notions of self through time). Each chapter can be read in isolation, and a comprehensive list of works on self is provided as a bibliography. This book will appeal to researchers and postgraduates engaged in the fields of Literature and Health Humanities, as well as psychology, sociology, and anthropology academics and students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040364505
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/22/2025
Series:	Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	230
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Alan Bleakley is Emeritus Professor of Medical Education and Medical Humanities at Plymouth Peninsula School of Medicine, Faculty of Health, University of Plymouth, UK. He is a leading international figure in medical education and medical humanities and is widely published as both an academic and poet.

Table of Contents

Preface

00 Introduction: The self, not a given but a problem

01 The camouflaged self

02 Authentic and inauthentic selves: duty of candour and whistleblowers

03 Ancient Greek practices of self-forming

04 Self as flâneur

05 Authenticity with muscle: the ancient Greek hero

06 Familiars

07 Renaissance self-fashioning

08 The alchemical self as outlaw: an experiment in embodied metaphor

09 Animal or plant self?: Geography matters

10 The enlightenment self as ‘subject to’ King and Divinity

11 The enlightened self: beyond subjection

12 Unique identifiers: fingerprints and ears

13 Talking yourself up: illeism

14 Possessed and absent selves

15 The modern ego: the all-seeing ‘I’

16 The origins of ‘self-help’

17 The relational self

18 Self stripped of rights

19 Self engulfed by panic

20 The self-righteous narcissist

21 Paranoia: beside oneself

22 The translational self: an attractor in a dynamic, complex system

23 The narrative construction of self

24 Personal confessional narratives constitute a confessional self

25 The self’s new religion: secular and humanistic

26 Writing out the modern self: postmodern prescriptions

27 Cancelling the self: postmodern anti-narrativists

28 As mad as a hatter: neurodivergent selves

29 Self-consciousness without consciousness: tacit knowing

30 Bodies at their limits: intentional self-fashioning

31 Wired for subjectivity

32 Loneliness

33 The fashioning of family

34 Feminist selves

35 Self as laboratory rat

36 The self in pieces: the yips

37 Mods

38 Politicised junior doctors

39 The progressively absent self

40 A roof over yourself

41 From carbon to silicon

42 Différance

43 Lacanian subjectivities

44 The neurological self

45 The linguistic transactional self in surgical settings

46 Subject to power/power runs through the subject

47 Bodies that are no-bodies: the biological self

48 The universal SELF

49 Subject to the abject

50 The final straw: the self’s last sip of life’s juice

Appendix: The disposable self as ‘worm’