On Being Beside Oneself

How should we think about the impact of identity upon our aesthetic understanding of a literary text that we propose to evaluate critically? This paper addresses this question by proposing the idea of "being beside" one's identities rather than within them, and examines how such a posture informs readings of two sources of longstanding aesthetic interest to the author. The first is a sentence that appears in Marcel Proust's Swann's Way ; the second, a traditional African American ring shout from the Georgia Sea Islands. A recurrent problem for identity in relation to understanding, it is argued, is the necessary openness and internal heterogeneity required of a genuinely critical perspective, one that cannot be given in advance of its encounter with the object because it must be open to being changed by the very object of its attention

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Limit (mathematics) · Mathematical analysis · Psychoanalysis · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory