Writing life in the twenty-first century: The body and the self in Paul Auster's winter journal and Juan José Millás's El Mundo

In Winter Journal (2012) and El mundo (2007), Auster and Millás revert to the primacy of the physical body as they record memories of the past. The discursive representation of the physical body in these two works emphasizes the complex nature of language. In these life narratives, written language is the best tool in the search for subjectivity, yet it also impedes getting closer to knowing the self. This current study analyzes experiences of the physical body in written language and the complex relationship between physicality and unintelligibility.