ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on forms of authorial and/or artistic self-representations in the work of painters such as Rembrandt and Marlene Dumas, the poetry of Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, and the autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Heffernan considers how such meta-representational gestures shape the gap between the writing/painting self and the written/painted self—a rupture that emphasizes the creating self’s process of perpetually becoming. In re-viewing one’s past self, the autobiographer always reshapes it; to see how artists and writers represent themselves, then, is to see how they each crack the mirror paradigm of self-representation. Art, as well as literature, manifests the impossibility of perfectly reflecting one’s life at any moment, the inevitability of self-dramatization, and the periodic necessity of self-signification: portraying oneself in ways that look nothing at all like what the mirror reflects.
