Unselfing
Book • 2023
Michaela Hulstyn's 'Unselfing' examines literary depictions of altered self-experience—pain, hallucination, deprivation, fear, desire, and spiritual transcendence—across a global French corpus.
Drawing on phenomenology and cognitive science, the book distinguishes forms of unselfing (disruption, mutation, fragmentation, destruction) and reads modernist and francophone texts to test philosophical claims about empathy and ethics.
Hulstyn interrogates whether self-loss leads to productive intersubjectivity or to alienation, complicating assumptions about empathy.
She situates her approach within global French studies to bridge formalist and postcolonial concerns, attending to both aesthetic form and power dynamics.
The book proposes the ethics of care as a more reliable ethical orientation than empathy in responses to unselfing.
Drawing on phenomenology and cognitive science, the book distinguishes forms of unselfing (disruption, mutation, fragmentation, destruction) and reads modernist and francophone texts to test philosophical claims about empathy and ethics.
Hulstyn interrogates whether self-loss leads to productive intersubjectivity or to alienation, complicating assumptions about empathy.
She situates her approach within global French studies to bridge formalist and postcolonial concerns, attending to both aesthetic form and power dynamics.
The book proposes the ethics of care as a more reliable ethical orientation than empathy in responses to unselfing.
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Gina Stam
Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
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Gina Stahm
Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
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Gina Stam
Michaela Hulstyn
Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
