Identity Out of Place seeks to develop a new way of thinking about the achievements of modernist literature and cinema, by looking at how modernist texts both problematize and reimagine identity. Engaging with understandings of modernism which emphasize its disidentifying or ‘unselfing’ qualities, I argue that these qualities can themselves only be understood as reopenings of identity as a question that is at stake in all human action and experience – at stake as intrinsically incomplete and out of place. The dissertation develops this account through detailed engagements with three significant works of French modernism which stage in the most exacting manner a problematization of identities and a questioning of the coherence of both self and world: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie / Endgame, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie. Each of these three chapters develops the dissertation’s overarching argument about modernism’s problematization and redetermination of identity, through readings of Flaubert’s derealization of the realist novel, in the context of his presentation of a woman’s crisis of identity in the face of a social world that offers her only alienating roles to occupy (Chapter One); Beckett’s meta-theatrical presentation of the performativity of the self and the debilitating interpersonal relationships taken on by individuals who cling to static identities in the face of a collapsing world (Chapter Two); and Godard’s modernist assault on predominant cinematic models of representing and narrating character, carried out through a discontinuous presentation of the life of a woman who is offered identity only in the form of sexual possession by men (Chapter Three). In the development of its account of self-relation as both constitutive for human experience and constitutively incomplete, the dissertation draws throughout on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work grounds self-relation in perception, as the primary form through which embodied human beings situate themselves in the world. It is precisely this capacity to situate oneself in the world that is radically put into question by the modernist texts I focus on, even as these texts reveal such an activity of self-situating self-relation to be at stake in even the most deprived of conditions. The Conclusion further develops this approach to self-relation as instrinsically at stake in experience, through an engagement with a series of thinkers (including Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Rancière, Michael Fried, and Robert Brandom) with regard to questions of the narrativity of identity. A mature form of personal life, I argue here, demands taking up a conscious relationship to the identities one holds in the world and for others, in recognition that who one is cannot be separated from one’s worldly existence. A mature form of social life – held out as a possibility by the works studied in this dissertation, in their rendering of the antinomies of modern struggles for and against identity – is shown to be one which enables individuals in the cultivation of such forms of responsible self-relation, through an overcoming of the alienating conditions that place identity in opposition to life.