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The self is a big story. In the early part of the century, pragmatists like William James, Charles Horton Cooley, and George Herbert Mead turned away from the transcendental self of philosophical reflection to formulate the new concept of an empirical selfthe notion that who and what we are is established in everyday interaction. The self was now a social structure, as Mead put it, even if it was located within the individual. The story has changed dramatically since then. Today, according to some postmodern critics, the self has been cast adrift on a sea of disparate images. Its just one swirling representation among others, bandied about the frenzy of a media-driven society. At the turn of the 21st century, the self has lost its traditional groundings and fizzled empirically. The self's very existence is seriously being questioned. The Self We Live By resurrects the big story by taking issue with this account. Holstein and Gubrium have crafted a comprehensive discussion that traces a different course of development, from the early pragmatists to contemporary constructionist considerations, rescuing the self from the scrap-heap of postmodern imagery. Glimpses of renewal are located in a new kind of ending, centered in an institutional landscape of diverse narratives, articulated in relation to an expanding horizon of identities. Not only is there a new story of the self, but were told that the self, itself, is narratively constructed. Yet as varied and plentiful as narrative identity has become, its disciplined by its social practices, which the authors discuss and illustrate in terms of the everyday technology of self construction. The empirical self, it turns out, has become more complex and varied than its formulators could have imagined.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 Restorying the Self
• Part I Envisioning a Social Self
• 2 Formulating a Social Self
• 3 The Dark Side
• 4 Two Options for the Postmodern Self
• 5 Ending the Story in Interpretive Practice
• Part II The Everyday Technology of Self Construction
• 6 Narrating the Self
• 7 Producing Self in Talk and Interaction
• 8 Conditions of Self Construction
• 9 Material Mediations
• Conclusion
• 10 The Moral Climate of the Self We Live By

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CHOICE Review

A fascinating attempt to reconcile the 20th-century concept of the social self with postmodernist thinking, this volume makes an important contribution to the literature of both the social sciences and humanities. Following a brief introductory chapter, the authors take the reader on a crisp, condensed historical journey through various conceptions of the self and the theorists most responsible for their development. They move from the European transcendental self to the James-Cooley-Mead socially constructed "looking-glass" self (or "selves") and Goffman's situated self to what they term the "dark side" of the social self, characterized by David Riesman's other-directed self and William Whyte's organizational self. Using the "false" selves of Arlie Hochschild and the possibility of a socially derived deviant self as transitional elements, the authors arrive at the postmodernist assertion that reality cannot be distinguished from representation. Borrowing from ethnomethodologists, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Lyotard, et al., Holstein and Gubrium use the remaining two-thirds of the book to develop their concept of a complex, postmodern self-in-use that is constantly under construction, a self that remains empirically grounded and socially situated (and resituated) and is also more institutionally mediated and, above all, endlessly narrated. Upper-division undergraduates and above. B. Ayers-Nachamkin; Wilson College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

James A. Holstein is at Marquette University. Jaber F. Gubrium is at University of Florida, Gainesville.