Fantasy, Fiction, and the Foundations of “Relational Authenticity”

J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy and Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling Revisited

Bibliographic Data

ID22008206
AuthorsNaomi Rokotnitz (0000-0002-6769-4348, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume23
Issue2
Pages204-233
Publication date2021-06-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInterdisciplinary Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2161-427X • E-ISSN: 1524-8429
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/intelitestud.23.2.0204
OpenAlexW3172139848
LanguageEN
References cited36

This article examines notions of authenticity, which have traditionally centered on the individual, and explores instead a view of authenticity that is “reciprocal” (Zahavi 2001; Rokotnitz 2014) and “relational” (Gallagher, Morgan, Rokotnitz 2018). Investigating how children may cultivate a sense of authenticity by engaging in two forms of imaginative projection—make-believe play and fictional stories—I explore how the co-constitution of self and other(s) advances the Existentialist project. Anchoring developmental data, philosophical argumentation, and critical analysis in a literary text written for and about children—J. M Barrie's Peter Pan—I unpack how play and fiction may contribute to authentic self-becoming by fostering social interchange and how this dynamic is made available for interrogation in Barrie's novel. The analysis presented here reveals Wendy to be the heroine of Barrie's novel, reconfiguring its implications for literary scholarship, and also explicates why categories first articulated by Søren Kierkegaard, such as “the single individual” (Fear 67), one's “absolute relation to the absolute” (78), and “witnessing” (104), are still worth pursuing in a post-postmodern twenty-first-century context. Above all, I re-define authentic self-becoming as fundamentally and necessarily relational

Argumentation theory · Art · Epistemology · Existentialism · Fantasy · Interrogation · Literature · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Scholarship · Sociology · Child Development and Digital Technology · History · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis

Tools

Open DOI