Kundera's Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self

Abstract

Milan Kundera's novel Immortality bears a close relation to contemporary social science debates about the production of the self. Commentators like Kleinman and Mishler seem to have introduced a new version of authenticity based on a reinvention of the Romantic subject with the interview (as the medium) and the narrative (as the content) portrayed as the means for constructing and sharing biographical expenence. Unlike such contem porary Romantics, Kundera examines how the subject is constructed in literary biography and mass media "imagology." The authors show how Kundera's work leads in two possible directions: an analysis of the interview society and a concern with strategies for the invention of the self. By locating styles of the self, the authors reveal lively and skillful biographical work, overlooked by cultural critique and not reducible to any structural determinism.