Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Apr 7, 2026

Michaela Hulstyn, Associate Director at Stanford and author of Unselfing, brings a concise scholar’s perspective on altered states and literary form. She discusses unselfing as loss or transcendence. She maps phenomenology, cognitive science, and global French texts. She questions empathy and sketches ethical alternatives.

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INSIGHT

Four Narrative Schemas For Unselfing

Hulstyn outlines four narrative schemas for unselfing: disruption, mutation, fragmentation, and destruction as alternatives to conversion stories.
She pairs Valéry and Delbo to show disruption as temporary loss of ordinary self during pain or deprivation, with divergent returns to normalcy.

ANECDOTE

Delbo's Useless Knowledge From Auschwitz

Charlotte Delbo recounts Auschwitz experiences where hunger, thirst, and hallucination produce a destabilized self she calls 'useless knowledge.'
Delbo describes mistaking herself for a woman screaming and being horrified by not sharing water, showing traumatic loss, not ethical gain.

INSIGHT

Pain Can Illuminate Or Alienate The Self

Paul Valéry treats disruption in pain as illuminating new inner contours and potential radical empathy, while Delbo finds return to ordinary life deeply troubling.
Reading them together challenges the optimism that unselfing yields intersubjective understanding.

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Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.

Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss.

Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

Guest Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is Associate Director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford University. Her research interests include philosophy and Literature; 20c and 21c French and Francophone African thought, cognitive approaches to aesthetics; global phenomenology; intermediality; decolonization; narrative. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles related to a number of these topics in forums such as Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites.
Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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