Author: Martin J. Gliserman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813014166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
"Offers its readers stimulating cross-disciplinary perspectives on a variety of literary works and enables each of them to spring to life anew. Its manifest aim, the desire to integrate corporeal and cultural experience in original ways, seems right on target for the nineties."--Ellen Handler Spitz, author of Image and Insight and Museums of the Mind "A major scholarly contribution which will alter and extend the received understanding of the history of the novel."--Peter Rudnytsky, University of Florida The growing field of "body studies," which examine the relationship between corporeal experience and the mind, includes scholars from the areas of psychological literary criticism and semiotics as well as psychoanalysis and gender studies. Combining contemporary linguistics and psychoanalysis, this work focuses on how the body emerges in the novel. In particular, it looks at the role that language plays in integrating the body and the mind. By drawing on language theory forged by Noam Chomsky and on the body awareness articulated by Sigmund Freud and others, Martin Gliserman discovers that the presence of the body is the core phenomenon of the novel. He scrutinizes the syntax of the novel's text (the arrangement of words in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters) as bodily gestures in a range of works that include erotic novels as well as those with themes of violence. Concentrating on primal bodily pain, he examines four novels chosen to span the issues of history, gender, and race: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and David Bradley's Chaneysville Incident. In each he reveals a primitive body fraught with desire that is distorted by fear, pain, and conflict. For Gliserman, words have a double life--they generate and fulfill our narrative lust; they also "live in another (deconstructed, synchronic, slipped) universe of discourse." In this work he unlaces language from the body and discovers a common, existential flesh. Martin J. Gliserman is associate professor of English at Rutgers University and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the editor of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture and has published articles in Modern Psychoanalysis, Jump-Cut, College English, and other journals.
Psychoanalysis, Language, and the Body of the Text
Author: Martin J. Gliserman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813014166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
"Offers its readers stimulating cross-disciplinary perspectives on a variety of literary works and enables each of them to spring to life anew. Its manifest aim, the desire to integrate corporeal and cultural experience in original ways, seems right on target for the nineties."--Ellen Handler Spitz, author of Image and Insight and Museums of the Mind "A major scholarly contribution which will alter and extend the received understanding of the history of the novel."--Peter Rudnytsky, University of Florida The growing field of "body studies," which examine the relationship between corporeal experience and the mind, includes scholars from the areas of psychological literary criticism and semiotics as well as psychoanalysis and gender studies. Combining contemporary linguistics and psychoanalysis, this work focuses on how the body emerges in the novel. In particular, it looks at the role that language plays in integrating the body and the mind. By drawing on language theory forged by Noam Chomsky and on the body awareness articulated by Sigmund Freud and others, Martin Gliserman discovers that the presence of the body is the core phenomenon of the novel. He scrutinizes the syntax of the novel's text (the arrangement of words in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters) as bodily gestures in a range of works that include erotic novels as well as those with themes of violence. Concentrating on primal bodily pain, he examines four novels chosen to span the issues of history, gender, and race: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and David Bradley's Chaneysville Incident. In each he reveals a primitive body fraught with desire that is distorted by fear, pain, and conflict. For Gliserman, words have a double life--they generate and fulfill our narrative lust; they also "live in another (deconstructed, synchronic, slipped) universe of discourse." In this work he unlaces language from the body and discovers a common, existential flesh. Martin J. Gliserman is associate professor of English at Rutgers University and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the editor of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture and has published articles in Modern Psychoanalysis, Jump-Cut, College English, and other journals.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813014166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
"Offers its readers stimulating cross-disciplinary perspectives on a variety of literary works and enables each of them to spring to life anew. Its manifest aim, the desire to integrate corporeal and cultural experience in original ways, seems right on target for the nineties."--Ellen Handler Spitz, author of Image and Insight and Museums of the Mind "A major scholarly contribution which will alter and extend the received understanding of the history of the novel."--Peter Rudnytsky, University of Florida The growing field of "body studies," which examine the relationship between corporeal experience and the mind, includes scholars from the areas of psychological literary criticism and semiotics as well as psychoanalysis and gender studies. Combining contemporary linguistics and psychoanalysis, this work focuses on how the body emerges in the novel. In particular, it looks at the role that language plays in integrating the body and the mind. By drawing on language theory forged by Noam Chomsky and on the body awareness articulated by Sigmund Freud and others, Martin Gliserman discovers that the presence of the body is the core phenomenon of the novel. He scrutinizes the syntax of the novel's text (the arrangement of words in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters) as bodily gestures in a range of works that include erotic novels as well as those with themes of violence. Concentrating on primal bodily pain, he examines four novels chosen to span the issues of history, gender, and race: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and David Bradley's Chaneysville Incident. In each he reveals a primitive body fraught with desire that is distorted by fear, pain, and conflict. For Gliserman, words have a double life--they generate and fulfill our narrative lust; they also "live in another (deconstructed, synchronic, slipped) universe of discourse." In this work he unlaces language from the body and discovers a common, existential flesh. Martin J. Gliserman is associate professor of English at Rutgers University and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the editor of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture and has published articles in Modern Psychoanalysis, Jump-Cut, College English, and other journals.
Hysteria from Freud to Lacan
Author: Monique David-Ménard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Writing, Speech and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Author: Shirley Zisser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000422348
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
This book explores the place of the flesh in the linguistically-inflected categories of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, drawing explicit attention to the organic as an inherent part of the linguistic categories that appear in the writings of Freud and Lacan. Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ famously involves a ‘linguistic turn’ in psychoanalysis. The centering of language as a major operator in psychic life often leads to a dualistic or quasi-dualistic view in which language and the enjoyment of the body are polarized. Exploring the intricate connections of the linguistic and the organic in both Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis from its beginnings, Zisser shows that surprisingly, and not only in Lacan’s late teaching, psycho-linguistic categories turn out to be suffused with organicity. After unfolding the remnant of the flesh in the signifier as a major component of Lacan’s critique of Saussure, using visual artworks as objective correlatives as it does so, the book delineates two forms of psychic writing. These are aligned not only with two fundamental states of the psychic apparatus as described by Freud (pain and satisfaction), but with two ways of sculpting formulated by Alberti in the Renaissance but also referred to by Freud. Continuing in a Derridean vein, the book demonstrates the primacy of writing to speech in psychoanalysis, emphasizing how the relation between speech and writing is not binary but topological, as speech in its psychoanalytic conception is nothing but the folding inside-out of unconscious writing. Innovatively placing the flesh at the core of its approach, the text also incorporates the seminal work of psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay to articulate the precise relation between the linguistic and the organic. Writing, Speech and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis will be indispensable to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, rhetoricians, deconstructionists, and those studying at the intersection of psychoanalysis, language, and the visual arts.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000422348
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
This book explores the place of the flesh in the linguistically-inflected categories of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, drawing explicit attention to the organic as an inherent part of the linguistic categories that appear in the writings of Freud and Lacan. Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ famously involves a ‘linguistic turn’ in psychoanalysis. The centering of language as a major operator in psychic life often leads to a dualistic or quasi-dualistic view in which language and the enjoyment of the body are polarized. Exploring the intricate connections of the linguistic and the organic in both Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis from its beginnings, Zisser shows that surprisingly, and not only in Lacan’s late teaching, psycho-linguistic categories turn out to be suffused with organicity. After unfolding the remnant of the flesh in the signifier as a major component of Lacan’s critique of Saussure, using visual artworks as objective correlatives as it does so, the book delineates two forms of psychic writing. These are aligned not only with two fundamental states of the psychic apparatus as described by Freud (pain and satisfaction), but with two ways of sculpting formulated by Alberti in the Renaissance but also referred to by Freud. Continuing in a Derridean vein, the book demonstrates the primacy of writing to speech in psychoanalysis, emphasizing how the relation between speech and writing is not binary but topological, as speech in its psychoanalytic conception is nothing but the folding inside-out of unconscious writing. Innovatively placing the flesh at the core of its approach, the text also incorporates the seminal work of psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay to articulate the precise relation between the linguistic and the organic. Writing, Speech and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis will be indispensable to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, rhetoricians, deconstructionists, and those studying at the intersection of psychoanalysis, language, and the visual arts.
Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
Author: William F Cornell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317575385
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
The body, of both the patient and the analyst, is increasingly a focus of attention in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially from a relational perspective. There is a renewed regard for the understanding of embodied experience and sexuality as essential to human vitality. However, most of the existing literature has been written by analysts with no formal training in body-centered work. In this book William Cornell draws on his experience as a body-centered psychotherapist to offer an informed blend of the two traditions, to allow psychoanalysts a deep understanding, in psychoanalytic language, of how to work with the body as an ally. The primary focus of Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy situates systematic attention to somatic experience and direct body-level intervention in the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It provides a close reading of the work of Wilhelm Reich, repositioning his work within a contemporary psychoanalytic frame and re-presents Winnicott’s work with a particular emphasis on the somatic foundations of his theories. William Cornell includes vivid and detailed case vignettes including accounts of his own bodily experience to fully illustrate a range of somatic attention and intervention that include verbal description of sensate experience, exploratory movement and direct physical contact. Drawing on relevant theory and significant clinical material, Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy will allow psychoanalysts an understanding of how to work with the body in their clinical practice. It will bring a fresh perspective on psychoanalytic thinking to body-centred psychotherapy where somatic experience is seen as an ally to psychic and interpersonal growth. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, transactional analysts, body-centred psychotherapists, Gestalt therapists, counsellors and students. William Cornell maintains an independent private practice of psychotherapy and consultation in Pittsburgh, PA. He has devoted 40 years to the study and integration of psychoanalysis, neo-Reichian body therapy and transactional analysis. He is a Training and Supervising Transactional Analyst and has established an international reputation for his teaching and consultation.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317575385
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
The body, of both the patient and the analyst, is increasingly a focus of attention in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially from a relational perspective. There is a renewed regard for the understanding of embodied experience and sexuality as essential to human vitality. However, most of the existing literature has been written by analysts with no formal training in body-centered work. In this book William Cornell draws on his experience as a body-centered psychotherapist to offer an informed blend of the two traditions, to allow psychoanalysts a deep understanding, in psychoanalytic language, of how to work with the body as an ally. The primary focus of Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy situates systematic attention to somatic experience and direct body-level intervention in the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It provides a close reading of the work of Wilhelm Reich, repositioning his work within a contemporary psychoanalytic frame and re-presents Winnicott’s work with a particular emphasis on the somatic foundations of his theories. William Cornell includes vivid and detailed case vignettes including accounts of his own bodily experience to fully illustrate a range of somatic attention and intervention that include verbal description of sensate experience, exploratory movement and direct physical contact. Drawing on relevant theory and significant clinical material, Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy will allow psychoanalysts an understanding of how to work with the body in their clinical practice. It will bring a fresh perspective on psychoanalytic thinking to body-centred psychotherapy where somatic experience is seen as an ally to psychic and interpersonal growth. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, transactional analysts, body-centred psychotherapists, Gestalt therapists, counsellors and students. William Cornell maintains an independent private practice of psychotherapy and consultation in Pittsburgh, PA. He has devoted 40 years to the study and integration of psychoanalysis, neo-Reichian body therapy and transactional analysis. He is a Training and Supervising Transactional Analyst and has established an international reputation for his teaching and consultation.
Lacan and the Limits of Language
Author: Charles Shepherdson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823227685
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
“Stages refreshing encounters between Lacanian psychoanalysis and its others: Kristeva, Heidegger, Derrida, or Foucault, to name just a few thinkers.” —Ewa Ziarek, author of An Ethics of Dissensus This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. The book also engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself. “Shepherdson shows with admirable clarity, cogency and competence that psychoanalysis founds an anthropology of love, hate, desire, beauty, fantasy and memory while keeping its cutting edge in today’s discussions of war, race, sexual difference and tragedy. Thanks to him, thinking with Lacan becomes an act of enlightenment.” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of Lacan in America
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823227685
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
“Stages refreshing encounters between Lacanian psychoanalysis and its others: Kristeva, Heidegger, Derrida, or Foucault, to name just a few thinkers.” —Ewa Ziarek, author of An Ethics of Dissensus This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. The book also engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself. “Shepherdson shows with admirable clarity, cogency and competence that psychoanalysis founds an anthropology of love, hate, desire, beauty, fantasy and memory while keeping its cutting edge in today’s discussions of war, race, sexual difference and tragedy. Thanks to him, thinking with Lacan becomes an act of enlightenment.” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of Lacan in America
Lacan and Literature
Author: Ben Stoltzfus
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438421362
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Winner of the 1997 Gradiva Award for Best Book (Cultural Arts Related) awarded by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to uncover the relationship between literature, reading, and the unconscious, this book argues for a special affinity between a text and its reader. This process strives to unveil the disguises of tropic language in order to generate manifest meaning from latent content. Focusing on five twentieth-century writers: D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Roland Barthes, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, this book shows how Freud's theories of condensation and displacement in dreams match Lacan's uses of metaphor and metonymy in language. Despite the different backgrounds of these authors from America, England, and France, the unifying theme is that the unconscious (because it is structured like language) is the voice of the (m)Other disguised in figurative language.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438421362
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Winner of the 1997 Gradiva Award for Best Book (Cultural Arts Related) awarded by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to uncover the relationship between literature, reading, and the unconscious, this book argues for a special affinity between a text and its reader. This process strives to unveil the disguises of tropic language in order to generate manifest meaning from latent content. Focusing on five twentieth-century writers: D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Roland Barthes, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, this book shows how Freud's theories of condensation and displacement in dreams match Lacan's uses of metaphor and metonymy in language. Despite the different backgrounds of these authors from America, England, and France, the unifying theme is that the unconscious (because it is structured like language) is the voice of the (m)Other disguised in figurative language.
The Body in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction
Author: Donald E. Hardy
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036989
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
This is a reading of physical obsession in O'Connor through linguistic and literary techniques. central struggle between spirit and matter in O'Connor through a close quantitative examination of the interactions of grammatical voice and physical bodies in her texts. Bridging literary theory and linguistics, Hardy demonstrates that the many constructions in which the body parts of O'Connor's characters are foregrounded, either as subjects or objects, are grammatical manipulations of semantic variations on what linguists deem the middle voice - roughly indicating that the subject is acting upon himself or herself. productive approach to understanding O'Connor's use of the body and its parts in her explorations of the sacramental and the grotesque. Linguistic analysis of grammatical middle voice is coupled with quantitative analysis of body-part words and the collocations in which they appear to present a new point of entrance to understanding O'Connor's stylistic manipulations of the body as central to the rift between spirit and matter. Through this method of reading O'Connor, Hardy makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of work that is introducing linguistic terminology and concepts into literary studies.
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036989
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
This is a reading of physical obsession in O'Connor through linguistic and literary techniques. central struggle between spirit and matter in O'Connor through a close quantitative examination of the interactions of grammatical voice and physical bodies in her texts. Bridging literary theory and linguistics, Hardy demonstrates that the many constructions in which the body parts of O'Connor's characters are foregrounded, either as subjects or objects, are grammatical manipulations of semantic variations on what linguists deem the middle voice - roughly indicating that the subject is acting upon himself or herself. productive approach to understanding O'Connor's use of the body and its parts in her explorations of the sacramental and the grotesque. Linguistic analysis of grammatical middle voice is coupled with quantitative analysis of body-part words and the collocations in which they appear to present a new point of entrance to understanding O'Connor's stylistic manipulations of the body as central to the rift between spirit and matter. Through this method of reading O'Connor, Hardy makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of work that is introducing linguistic terminology and concepts into literary studies.
Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot
Author: Fernanda Magallanes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429750099
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot is a new radical departure in psychoanalytic exposition. An attempt is made to convey, in a language accessible for people from different disciplines, some of the most difficult processes that conform our subjectivity and our concept of difference and alterity. Containing both significant theoretical material and applications of the theory to clinical psychoanalytic practice, this book offers the latest thinking on the importance of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cultural theorists.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429750099
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot is a new radical departure in psychoanalytic exposition. An attempt is made to convey, in a language accessible for people from different disciplines, some of the most difficult processes that conform our subjectivity and our concept of difference and alterity. Containing both significant theoretical material and applications of the theory to clinical psychoanalytic practice, this book offers the latest thinking on the importance of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cultural theorists.
The Body
Author: Tiffany Atkinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230213367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
What do we mean when we talk about 'the body'? This Reader challenges the assumption that it can be invoked as a neutral, or indeed natural, point of reference in critical discussion or cultural practice. The essays collected here foreground the historical construction of 'the body' throughout a range of discourses from the modern to the postmodern, and seek to present it not as a biological 'given', but as a contestable signifier in the articulation of identities.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230213367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
What do we mean when we talk about 'the body'? This Reader challenges the assumption that it can be invoked as a neutral, or indeed natural, point of reference in critical discussion or cultural practice. The essays collected here foreground the historical construction of 'the body' throughout a range of discourses from the modern to the postmodern, and seek to present it not as a biological 'given', but as a contestable signifier in the articulation of identities.
The Barthes Effect
Author: Réda Bensmaïa
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816613796
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Book Description
The Barthes Effect was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The author acknowledges the essay as an eccentric phenomenon in literary history, one that has long resisted entry into the taxonomy of genres, as it concentrates on four works by Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Camera Lucida. Maintains that with Barthes the essay achieves a status of its own, as reflective text. ". . . a study rigorously conscious of the critical maneuvers it executes and, more importantly, questions as critical practice . . . " Bensmaïa's strategy produces a successful investigation of the interstices and slippages of meaning which Barthes addressed in his work." SubStance Reda Bensmaia is associate professor in the departments of French and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, and translator Pat Fedkiew, a graduate student in French at Minnesota. Michele Richman is associate professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816613796
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Book Description
The Barthes Effect was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The author acknowledges the essay as an eccentric phenomenon in literary history, one that has long resisted entry into the taxonomy of genres, as it concentrates on four works by Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Camera Lucida. Maintains that with Barthes the essay achieves a status of its own, as reflective text. ". . . a study rigorously conscious of the critical maneuvers it executes and, more importantly, questions as critical practice . . . " Bensmaïa's strategy produces a successful investigation of the interstices and slippages of meaning which Barthes addressed in his work." SubStance Reda Bensmaia is associate professor in the departments of French and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, and translator Pat Fedkiew, a graduate student in French at Minnesota. Michele Richman is associate professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift.