The Lying Mirror : The First-Person Stance and Sixteenth-Century Writing

In recent years, discussion of first-person writing in the humanities and social sciences has been largely taken up with questions concerning the status of the 'self'. The objective of the analyses offered here-of sixteenth-century texts from France and the Low Countries, by Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne and several poets-is to speak about conceptions of first-person intentional action without posing the question in terms of the ontology of the self, its discovery or its prehistory. Questions of 'selfhood' can be more profitably rearticulated as those concerning intentionality and agency, what the text is for, and what its aims are. These problems can be raised without excessive attention to the evolution of a unified, self-conscious 'self' lying at the core of the first-person pronoun. In particular, disingenuousness and indirection-central concerns of this book-are fruitful concepts for thinking about textual agency and the ethics of the first-person stance.