Current and Recent Research Students
Mrs Sabine Mercer
Biography
My research project explores the understanding of selfhood that is central to the humanities and specifically foregrounded in autobiographical fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century. I investigate the function of memory, intentionality and the role of belief and desire in the intersubjective and introspective constitution of self and some of the potential connections between scientific and postmodern theorising.
Since my start in January 2011, I have built up a foundation of historical models that show key moments in the development of a tradition of confession/autobiography that I will use to underpin my reading of the innovative fiction of 'postmodernism' in order to show and analyse ways in which contemporary writers are working with already established ideas of self-fashioning, splitting, aporia and constructionism.
My aim is to show how autobiographical fiction from 1900, and especially after 1960, develops links between confessional, psychoanalytic and social constructionist models of the self and I hope to find a link between self-narratives and the cognitive neurosciences that have emerged since the 1980s.
