Deconstructing and Reconstructing Identity. Philosophical Frames and Literary Experiments

Of all the crises postmodernity continues or itself generates, the identity crisis tends to be considered symptomatic. The search for identity was an imperative in modernism, culminating in the literature of existentialist influence. In postmodernism, the individual's cutting off from transcendence, the loss of essence and meaning of existence itself are no longer considered a tragedy. He turns towards the past in an ontological need for spiritual regeneration, the modernist epistemological doubt being replaced by the ontological one. That one of the dominant, obsessively resurfacing issues of the mid and late twentieth-century fiction is the problem of the subject, of constructing identity, has probably been due to the tremendous influence that psychoanalytic writings have had upon the contemporary mind and stage. Postmodern, hyperrealist, magic realist and all the other experimental types of writing have primarily focused on this problem reflected in fictional characterisation, authorship and intentionality, reception and readership, narrative technique, style, genre and thematics. (C) 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.