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

TLDR

Milan Kundera’s *Immortality* engages contemporary debates on self‑production, contrasting commentators who link authenticity to interview‑based narratives with Kundera’s focus on how the self is constructed in literary biography and mass‑media imagology. The study explores how Kundera’s novel points to both an analysis of the interview society and strategies for inventing the self. The authors identify distinct self‑styles that illuminate vibrant biographical work overlooked by cultural critique and resist reduction to structural determinism.

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.