Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why. The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies. These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan's symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002727 "This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why. The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies. These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan's symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek."-- Provided by publisher Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Contributors Editor’s Introduction: “Ampersands” PART I: Psychoanalysis, Text, and the Constitution of Subjectivity 1 Freud’s Early Case Studies: The Temptation of the Plot 2 Freeing Impersonality: The Objective Subject in Psychoanalysis and Sense & Sensibility 3 Lacan’s Romanticism 4 Trauma Theory, or Literature’s Will to Power 5 Queering the Death Drive: Counter/Transferential Language in Joseph Conrad 6 Didier Anzieu Now: Stretching the Shared Skin of the Work of Art 7 What Does the Poem Do? Literature and Psychoanalysis After Badiou PART II: Reopening Narratives with Revised Concepts 8 Deconstructing the Oedipus Complex: Kenzaburo Ôe and Haruki Murakami on the Way to a Theory of Global Culture 9 Phantom Thread: Threading Between Dresses and Debts 10 Signs and Symbols, or the Nabokovian Unconscious 11 Cyber-Ego Sum: Autofiction versus Psychoanalysis 12 Literature and the Social Bond 13 How to Mourn the Present: Fiction, Memory, and Mourning in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark and John Banville’s Ancient Light 14 Teaching Degree Zero: Impossible Texts Inventing Subjectivities in the Classroom Index