On "Self", essayismus, Charles Lamb and Stanisław Brzozowski

By introducing the theory of the self to modern disputes on identity and subjectivity in the literary text, the article retells contemporary discussions on theory of the self from the Chicago school of symbolic interactionism (G.H. Mead) through its development in social psychology (E. Goffman) to postmodern compelling ideas of A. Giddens, M. Foucault, J. Glass, K. Gergen, J. Baudrillard and Z. Bauman. This retelling is generated by the question whether the social sciences’ analysis of a subject can be useful in literary studies, traditionally relying on philosophical debates about the identity of a person. The main area of observation becomes modern Polish essay, with the specific example of Stanisław Brzozowski’s last completed essay, the one on Charles Lamb. The text proposes an idea of recursive subjectivity based on the structures of the self - social, interactive, and reflexive