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Episode details

Radio 3,24 Feb 2011,15 mins

SeriesThe Life Cycle of a Fictional Character - An Alternative History of the Novel

The Self

The Essay

Available for over a year

Critic James Wood explores aspects of novelistic technique through a fictional character. Is our fictional character a coherent self? Up till now, we have assumed so. But why? The thrust of twentieth-century philosophy and cultural theory, not to mention the latest findings of neuro-biology, all work to suggest, instead, the incoherence of the self, the self's relative lack of autonomy.

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