Abstract

While contemporary inquiries into the nature of the "self" are inclined to allow previously marginalized groups to assert their status as subjects and their stories as narratives, the postmodern denial of authorship and deconstruction of the self as a linguistic construction throws this entire inquiry into question. But while deconstruction calls autobiography into question by problematizing the authority and source of any utterance, others point out that the postmodern deconstruction of subjectivity is a luxury of the privileged. As one philosopher puts it, "in order to announce the death of the subject one must have gained the right to speak as one." ;Paul Ricoeur sees his work as providing a solution to the recent debates concerning the status of the subject. Ricoeur's is a narrative solution. Aristotelian muthos becomes the imaginative technique whereby an otherwise fractured and fluctuating subject constitutes herself. ;But I argue that this exclusive focus on Aristotelian employment causes a marginalization of narratives based on other constructions of experience. Aristotelian muthos is a process of making the intelligible out of the accidental, the universal from the singular, the necessary from the episodic. But there are different kinds of narrative practice which represents subjectivity that is disjunctive and non-linear. This type of narrative practice is aligned with the postmodern suspicion of identity, and yet it recognizes the imperative for situating an already marginal subject. While canonical Western narratives associate identity with formal integrity, I argue that textual discontinuity results from experienced nonlinearity and that these textual qualities are deliberate strategies to subvert authoritarian modes of self-representation. ;I propose an alternative to Narrative Identity Theory, a theory I call Internarrative Identity Theory, which involves a more inclusive notion of plot. To unbind classical structure is to maximize agency in determining, and re-determining, who one is in a way that is truly imaginative