Kundera's Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self
- 1 September 1997
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Qualitative Inquiry
- Vol. 3 (3) , 304-325
- https://doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300304
Abstract
Milan Kundera's novel Immortality bears a close relation to contemporary social science debates about the production of the self. Commentators like Kleinman and Mishler seem to have introduced a new version of authenticity based on a reinvention of the Romantic subject with the interview (as the medium) and the narrative (as the content) portrayed as the means for constructing and sharing biographical expenence. Unlike such contem porary Romantics, Kundera examines how the subject is constructed in literary biography and mass media "imagology." The authors show how Kundera's work leads in two possible directions: an analysis of the interview society and a concern with strategies for the invention of the self. By locating styles of the self, the authors reveal lively and skillful biographical work, overlooked by cultural critique and not reducible to any structural determinism.Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- Narrative Turn or Blind Alley?Qualitative Health Research, 1997
- Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st CenturyPublished by SAGE Publications ,1997
- Qualitative Inquiry and the Deprivatization of ExperienceQualitative Inquiry, 1995
- The Active InterviewPublished by SAGE Publications ,1995
- Grounding the Postmodern SelfThe Sociological Quarterly, 1994
- Disruptive VoicesPublished by University of Michigan Library ,1992
- Out of Control: Family Therapy and Domestic DisorderPublished by SAGE Publications ,1992
- Talking and Listening from Women's Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and AnalysisSocial Problems, 1990
- Interpretive BiographyPublished by SAGE Publications ,1989
- The Long InterviewPublished by SAGE Publications ,1988