Abstract

Through an analysis of the work of Mikhal Bakhtin, George Herbert Mead, and Jurgen Habermas, the dissertation explores the particular historical connections between discourses and material practices and how they relate to the fundamental issue of the formation of the self, and their empirical articulation in literature and film through the motif of the "road." Specifically, the project attempts to provide a theoretical basis from which to examine meanings and interpretations of cultural objects, both in terms of their historical transformations and discontinuities, as well as their stabilities and persistences. In particular, the project focuses on the debates in what Habermas refers to as "post-metaphysical thinking," philosophies of language, and the pragmatic turn in theories of language and meaning. This turn allows for a reconceptualization of traditional notions of the formation of self and subjectivity, wherein the self not treated as something immanent or transcendental; instead, the self is seen as a construct, which, in its attempt to negotiate the world, emerges through interaction with others. It is argued that this reformulation offers a more adequate model of culture and its relation both to "subjects" and to society as a whole, one which allows for a non-deterministic way of considering the relation of cultural systems or structures to social individuals and their social experience. ;For historical sociology of culture, the metaphor of the "road" constitutes a rich thematic from which to address these issues surrounding the understanding of "self-hood," culture and society. Through an examination of this motif in three cases studies--Don Quixote, Jude The Obscure, and the film Mad Max--the project explores the changing forms of articulation of the self at a sociohistorical level. At a very general level, the trope has been linked to questions of self-hood since antiquity, albeit in radically varying ways. Indeed, it is precisely the historical transformations which such a trope undergoes that allows an investigation into the understandings which a particular society has of itself. Thus, the epic road of Odysseus is not the mundane and commonplace byways of Don Quixote's journeys, nor the futuristic and nihilistic highway of Mad Max, and neither are the articulations of the self in each work. And, equally, the selves which are discovered, won, or escaped from throughout these travels are not the same. In each, however, a comprehensive notion of the meaning of self is articulated, and a contextualizing reference made to a definite social reality