Affect, Creativity and the Writing Self (Inventions of the Self II)

4-None

This interdisciplinary course examines the concept of the “self” and its transformations through the lens of experimental autobiography, contemporary psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Asks a set of concentric questions about emotion and self-writing: How do emotions enter the domains of consciousness and language? How does a stable selfhood emerge from the flux of emotional life, consciousness and memory? How do writers experiment with selfhood? Examines the logic of experimental auto-fiction as a function of the unstable biological, psychological and linguistic mechanisms underpinning selfhood, and to explore the implications of this instability for the creative arts, mental health and society as a whole.