ABSTRACT
Personal narrative is a discursive mise en scene, in which a self emerges from the shifting interplay of signifiers and utterances. The process of mythopoesis is also one of intertextuality, where the personal narrative, by the very fact of being written, is enmeshed in the dominant myths of a particular society. The privileged site of the personal narrative is the name, since a name is both the encapsulation of a past and the potential for a future. A name may be experienced as a compelling scenario, a legitimation which is at once a binding obligation and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Delegitimation has two sides: self-exclusion from a world one rejects and by which one is rejected, and self-inclusion in a world of the marginalised, which may be seen as potentially a social or creative utopia. It works on the boundary, moving between high and low, between the exception and the rule, exploiting the gaps, the lines of flight.
