The grant we received from the British Society of Aesthetics has enabled us to carry out the project we first dreamt up together in the early months of 2024. A literary scholar working on twenty-first-century autofiction (Scarlett), and a philosopher of aesthetics working on the role of art in human self-understanding (Alice), we found common ground in our ambition to take an interdisciplinary approach to questions of narrative and selfhood.

Event: Literature in the Age of the Self

On the 16 June 2025, we welcomed more than 330 registered attendees to the free public event we organized as part of our project on the representation of the self in contemporary culture. Entitled ‘Literature in the Age of the Self’, the event brought together philosophers, literary scholars, and highly acclaimed literary authors to discuss the meaning of selfhood in philosophy, in literature and literary criticism, and in history.

First, three academics gave a series of engaging, scene-setting talks:

Prof. Clare Carlisle (KCL Philosophy) is the author of Transcendence for Beginners (forthcoming), The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (2023), Spinoza’s Religion (2021), Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (2019), On Habit (2014)

considered the self in the history of philosophy.

Dr Eric Langley (UCL English), author of Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies (2018), Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2009), and, as a poet, of Raking Light (2017)

gave a talk entitled ‘Being Interesting, Feeling Particular’.

Prof. Tom Stern (UCL Philosophy, A&H Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinarity), author of Nietzsche’s Ethics (2019) and Philosophy and Theatre (2013), editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019), The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting (2017); and co-editor of The Proustian Mind (2023)

gave a talk entitled ‘Nietzsche, Self-Creation, and Nietzsche-Creation’.

These talks were followed by an audience Q and A.

The second part of the event was dedicated to a creative roundtable
bringing celebrated writers in conversation with each other and the audience to discuss the experience and representation of selfhood in the twenty-first century. 

Our guests were:

Rachel Cusk, novelist (Parade, 2024, Second Place, 2021, the Outline trilogy – Outline | Transit | Kudos, 2014-18, Arlington Park, 2006, among many others), memoirist (A Life’s Work, 2001; The Last Supper, 2009; Aftermath, 2012), and playwright (Medea, 2015).

Brian Dillon, memoirist (In the Dark Room, 2005), novelist (Sanctuary, 2011), author of a number of genre-defying books blending the personal and the critical (Affinities, 2023; Suppose a Sentence, 2020; Essayism, 2017; The Great Explosion, 2015; Objects in this Mirror, 2014; I Am Sitting in a Room, 2012; Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, 2009), and curator (Tate and Hayward Galleries).

Vidyan Ravinthiran, memoirist (Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, 2025), poet (Avidyā, forthcoming; The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, 2019; Grun-tu-molani, 2014), and Harvard academic (Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose, 2022; Worlds Woven Together, 2022; Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, 2015).

This conversation, chaired by Scarlett and Alice, was full of surprising insights and fascinating revelations about these authors’ respective creative practices and perceptions of the place of the self in their writing.

It was followed by audience Q and A.

We are preparing a short film featuring the highlights of the event, and plan to release a lightly edited version of the authorial roundtable as a special bonus episode of Selfy Stories.

Podcast: Selfy Stories

Having previously set up a Literature and Philosophy Reading group UCL, we applied to the BSA for financial support for the production of a podcast which would disseminate the group’s discussions to a far wider extramural audience of interested readers and thinkers.

The podcast we produced comprises twelve episodes, including one 15-min trailer and one 90-minute special episode. In each episode, we ponder how literary representations of the self relate to what philosophers say about it. The literary focus of the first five episodes is Outline (2014), the best-selling novel by Rachel Cusk. The literary focus of next five episodes is The Years (2008), by the Nobel-Prize winning French author Annie Ernaux. Each week, chapters of these books are discussed alongside relevant twentieth or twenty-first-century interventions in philosophy.

The trailer and first five episodes of Selfy Stories were released in May and early June. Since then, we’ve received a lot of interest, five-star ratings only on Apple Podcasts, and extremely positive feedback from our listeners. The next six episodes are in now production and are due for release at weekly intervals in August and September. Three of these involve brilliant and engaging guests – philosophers Prof. Clare Carlisle (KCL) and Prof. Lucy O’Brien (UCL) and philosophy graduate student Emmanuel Campion-Dye (UCL). The bonus episode will consist of a recording of the authorial roundtable conversation held under the auspices of the Literature in the Age of the Self event we organized, also thanks to BSA funding, on 16 June 2025.

BPA/SWIP

Our project followed the BPA/SWIP good practice guidance.

Literature in the Age of the Self: Involving 4 women (including the two host organizers), the event achieved gender parity. (NB: We had intended to host another woman, Eline Arbo, as one of our speakers; she accepted our invitation, but later had to cancel on health grounds; she was replaced by Brian Dillon).

Selfy Stories: The podcast hosts and the two authors whose works we focus on are women. Six out of ten of the philosophers we focus on are women. Two out of three of our guests on the show have been women.

Conclusion and Thanks

The grant we were awarded by the BSA last year has been invaluable. We could not have recorded the podcast or held the Literature in the Age of the Self event without it. From our point of view, both have been a great success. Our personal research has benefited immensely from our work on the project, and, much more importantly, we feel we have been empowered to share it with a much wider audience than it ever would have reached without the BSA’s support. Selfy Stories has found an enthusiastic and appreciative audience and Literature in the Age of the Self was a high-profile sell-out event which drew in hundreds of members of the public, many of whom have expressed their gratitude to us for organizing it. We believe our efforts have had a substantial positive impact on those it was intended to reach, and for that, and for its positive impact on our own work in the field of aesthetics, we are enormously grateful.