Dr Scarlett Baron (UCL English) and Alice Harberd (PhD student in UCL Philosophy) have launched a new UCL podcast, Selfy Stories. The podcast distils the discussions held in a Philosophy and Literature Reading Group which ran at UCL during the Autumn and Spring terms.
Reference to the self is ubiquitous in contemporary culture. But what is the self? Is it discovered or created? To what degree is it shaped by external forces and to what degree is it subject to internal control? How do the stories we tell about ourselves shape our identity? And what kinds of self does literature delineate?
These are some of the questions asked by Scarlett Baron and Alice Harberd in their new UCL podcast, Selfy Stories. In each episode, and Scarlett (a literary scholar) and Alice (a philosopher) ponder how present-day literary representations of the self relate to what philosophers have to say about it. The literary focus of the first season is Outline by Rachel Cusk; the literary focus of the second is The Years by Annie Ernaux. Each week, Alice and Scarlett discuss sections from these captivating books, combining incisive critical interpretation with insights gleaned from philosophy.
Click here to listen to Selfy Stories today.
Selfy Stories is supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the British Society for Aesthetics, and the UCL Centre for Humanities Education.