Christine Marks

I am because you are" is a key passage in What I Loved (2003), contemporary American writer Siri Hustvedt's third novel, and a recurring motif throughout both her fictional and nonfictional work. This volume examines relational identity formation in her writing, especially the relationship between self and other in photography and painting, the transgression of corporeal boundaries in hysteria and anorexia, and the effects of losing attachment figures on personal identity. Hustvedt reveals identity as a complex product of conscious and unconscious interconnections within the social and biological environment. Through her unique investigations of these connections and the fragile boundaries between self and other, she enters new territory in the field of literary identity research. This volume further explores this territory through different discursive approaches, from philosophies of intersubjectivity to relational psychoanalysis.

Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt

"I Am Because You Are"

Hubert Zapf

Johanna Hartmann

This collection comprises essays from various interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. literary scholarship, intermediality, art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine – to analyze and interpret the fictional and non-fictional works by Siri Hustvedt, an author whose reputation and public presence have been growing steadily in the 21st century and who is recognized as one of the most widely read and appreciated contemporary American writers. In her significance and stature as a public intellectual, she is not merely an American writer but a transnational, cosmopolitan author, who develops new forms not only of literary narrative but of interdisciplinary thought and writing, bringing together otherwise separated genres and branches of knowledge in a broad spectrum between literature and philosophy, historiography and art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, narrative and medicine. The present volume is structured into the parts “Literary Creation and Communication,” Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” “Medicine and Narrative,” “Vision, Perception, and Power,” and “Trauma, Memory, and the Ambiguities of Self” and closes with an interview of Siri Hustvedt by Susanne Becker in which Hustvedt elucidates her personal conception of her own creative processes of writing.

Christine Marks

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