| The notion of cultural identity has always been an intriguing property of human society. The product of the confluence of discursive economies and fundamentally a function of language, identity embodies prevailing schemes of social order. At the center of this framework of cultural economies and culturally intelligible language lies the body, a sort of permeable membrane between internal and external, which serves as the locus of identity production and reproduction. Of course, the type of identity with which we are today most familiar is that of the individual, but while we are becoming quite aware of the relationship between the configurations of the modern body and the individual, the cultural body of earlier periods is less familiar. Examining the body and its affects in Wolfram's Parzival and Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, for instance, reveals a much different vocabulary of identity, ranging from corporate identity to the first murmurings of individual differentiation. |
