Drawing on ideas from Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, Kenneth Burke, and Mikhail Bakhtin, this work focuses on the centrality of the social act in describing and understanding the beingness of the human individual, situating such acts in dialogic and rhetorical processes. Such processes enable actors to give presence to their selves and, it is claimed, put them into play by using both a logic and a poetic of identity. These arguments are supported by an analysis of everyday conversations, certain inter-personal encounters, and acts of reading and watching sporting engagements.

"Perinbanayagam's work provides stimulating analyses of the ways and means the self is so constituted. Included in this account is a fascinating effort to show how rhetorical, theatrical, logical, and poetical structures reside in the ways the self is made present. There is much here that fits well with a social phenomenological account." - Journal Of Phenomenological Psychology

"This is a seminal book of great significance for social psychologists and sociologists, particularly sybmolic interactionists. With great erudition and clarity the author has set forth a basic conception of the self and its development, continuity, and change in the context of prosesses of interaction with others." - Symbolic Interaction

"A densely written, erudite, and important theoretical work on issues of central significance to social psychology and related disciplines in the social sicence and humanities." - Contemporary Sociology