Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness

"Hulstyn’s fascinating studies of different kinds of experiential unravelling – disruption, mutation, fragmentation, and destruction – show how the consequences of boundary loss are not preordained but depend on the self’s situation, resources, and aims. Her exploration of ‘unselfing’ as both a transcultural, transhistorical structure of experience and a variable response to particular social and political circumstances is an exemplary cognitive-phenomenological exploration of our biocultural hybridity."

Paul Armstrong, Professor of English, Brown University, and Author of Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative

"Unselfing makes the case for the phenomenological function of literature. Through meticulous readings, Hulstyn, who disregards the usual French vs. Francophone divide to instead bring together works from a more capacious Francosphère, shows how it is in literature – in narratives produced by seemingly solid and legible authorial selves – that we can find the most compelling accounts of subjectivity at its limits and the relationality to be found beyond it."

Annabel L. Kim, Author of Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature