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Notions of Self and First-person Sources: concepts and Methods (HEC-RS-NOTSEL-24)

HEC-RS-NOTSEL-24

Description

>Sources written in the first person, used in the past to build great narratives about the rise of individualism in Western history, have been for the past decades interrogated in less teleological ways, acknowledging their wide diversity in form, purpose, geographies and authorships. This seminar aims at offering conceptual and methodological tools for dealing with a variety of egodocuments (texts in which authors wrote about their own feelings, thoughts and actions): from fully blown self-narratives (diaries, memoirs, spiritual and lay autobiographies), to fragmentary or involuntary life-stories in travel accounts, advice literature, libri di famiglia, correspondence, petitions, wills and court depositions. We will discuss together some of the historiographical issues they raise: self-fashioning and relational identities; privacy and publicity; gender, confessional, social and cultural differences; intention and circulation; fictional and prescriptive models, and the material culture of writing.

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