Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative PDF Author: Esther Rashkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400863031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The "haunted" individual to whom the "encrypted" secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation. In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, "authorship," and the formation and origins of narrative. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative PDF Author: Esther Rashkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400863031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The "haunted" individual to whom the "encrypted" secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation. In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, "authorship," and the formation and origins of narrative. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture

Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture PDF Author: Esther Rashkin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791477975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Explores the radical political potential of close reading to make the case for a new and invigorated psychoanalytic cultural studies.

The Spectralities Reader

The Spectralities Reader PDF Author: Maria del Pilar Blanco
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441124780
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Ghosts, spirits, and specters have played important roles in narratives throughout history and across nations and cultures. A watershed moment for this area of study was the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx in 1993, marking the inauguration of a "spectral turn" in cultural criticism. Gathering together the most compelling texts of the past twenty years, the editors transform the field of spectral studies with this first ever reader, employing the ghost as an analytical and methodological tool. The Spectralities Reader takes ghosts and haunting on their own terms, as wide-ranging phenomena that are not conscripted to a single aesthetic genre or style. Divided into six thematically discreet sections, the reader covers issues of philosophy, politics, media, spatiality, subject formation (gender, race and sexuality), and historiography. It anthologizes the previously published work of theoretical heavyweights from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben, alongside work by literary and cultural historians such as Jeffrey Sconce and Roger Luckhurst.

Remembering Generations

Remembering Generations PDF Author: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875589
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors. Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility--of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton PDF Author: Paula M. Salvio
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791480089
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Winner of the 2008 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our histories—both personal and social—exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of some of the key problems and questions in feminist teaching: navigating the appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and knowledge. Examining Sexton's pedagogy, with its "weird abundance" of tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton's use of the autobiographical "I" is as much a literary identity as a literal identity, one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital role in the humanities classroom.

Norman N. Holland

Norman N. Holland PDF Author: Jeffrey Berman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150137298X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have become classics in the field. Jeffrey Berman analyzes all of Holland's books, and many of his 250 scholarly articles, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the critic's thinking over time. A controversial if not polarizing figure, Holland is discussed in relation to his closest colleagues, including Murray Schwartz, Bernard Paris, and Leslie Fiedler, as well as his fiercest critics, among them Frederick Crews, David Bleich, and Jonathan Culler, creating a dynamic and personal portrait. Insofar as this text illuminates the evolving mind of a premier literary critic, it produces a parallel profile of the American reader, the primary object of Holland's extensive work.

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317313127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

The Spectral Body

The Spectral Body PDF Author: Dragon Zoltan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443811440
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó analyses some of the films made by Academy Award winner Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó to establish an interpretative matrix disclosing the root of haunting effects in the visual and the narrative levels of the diegeses. By combining two distinct—and often incongruous—lines of psychoanalytic thought (by Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Lacan), Zoltán Dragon argues that these films are fuelled by the work of a phantom on all levels, hiding the secrets of the family history of the characters and producing uncanny visual scenarios to make the act of hiding even more effective. The book brings the reader into the realm of the “phantom text” generating the film texts and crypt screens of the oeuvre, and investigates the causes of undiscussible and painful secrets that propel some pivotal characters to reappear in subsequent films, apparently driven by a compulsion to continue their narration, failing to finish their stories—even when they appear to be successful. The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó introduces a visual reinterpretation of Abraham’s phantom theory that opens up possibilities for an alternative way of studying film. I first saw this work in the form of a full and detailed draft. I was impressed by the boldness of the ideas, the attempt to integrate and work with different theoretical positions and the quite extraordinary reading of the films of István Szabó. There was clearly a powerful and creative and original intelligence at work. A further draft accomplished one important thing that had been missing from the first one – the direct analysis of the visual material and its contribution to the overall narrative and theoretical framework. The work employs a psychoanalytic framework with some key concepts such as ‘the phantom’ drawn from the work of Torok and Abraham. This theory is fairly well known but it has not, to my knowledge, been used in any extensive way in the analysis of film texts before. Zoltan also makes reference to Freud and uses some Lacanian ideas in his analysis at the level of the visual. These multiple theoretical references are not inconsistent; they are finely judged and are most productive. Theory is never used as a grid to be imposed on the material. There is a fine balance between theory and textual analysis that is hard to achieve, but it is successful here. I think that the position that Zoltan Dragon has forged for himself and from which he writes, is a highly original and interesting one. He has been most successful in developing his framework in relation to Szabó’s oeuvre which he knows in the greatest detail. His readings of that oeuvre are rich and powerful and will provoke considerable debate in the world of film studies and also of psychoanalytical studies. Parveen Adams, Core Teaching Faculty, London Consortium

Gothic Hauntings

Gothic Hauntings PDF Author: Christine Berthin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230275125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
What is buried in the crypts of the Gothic? Building on psychoanalytic research on haunting, cryptonymy and melancholy, as well as on French philosophies of language, this book explores how haunting is not just a Gothic narrative device but the symptom of an impossibility of representation and of an irreparable loss at the heart of language.

Cryptomimesis

Cryptomimesis PDF Author: Carla Jodey Castricano
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773522646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt have appeared with increasing frequency in Jacques Derrida's writings and, for the most part, have gone unaddressed. In Cryptomimesis Jodey Castricano examines the intersection between Derrida's writing and the Gothic to theorize what she calls Derrida's "poetics of the crypt."