This article aims at studying the evolution of the woman-dragon relation by comparing texts from English and French medieval literature and contemporary fantasy literature texts, in French and English as well. We will first determine the similarities between the two corpora, especially regarding the narrative triad composed of the knight, the princess and the dragon. We will then deal with the reorganization of the narrative space by examining the shift in focalization from the knight to the woman and the (...) dragon, thus placing them as heroes of the story. We will eventually try to explain the evolution of the values born by these two characters and demonstrate if there is, or not, a new woman-dragon relation in contemporary literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French LiteratureGeoffrey Galt HarphamOrnament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, by Rae Beth Gordon; xvii & 288pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, $42.50.As Rae Beth Gordon notes in the introduction to her stimulating and original book, ornament, which is devoted to grace, charm, and attractiveness, becomes the object of suspicion and moralizing disdain when it exceeds what numerous commentators (...) refer to as “its proper limits.” The limits are set low by those who wish to maintain the integrity of the center—the melodic line, the text, the main image, the literal sense, the consensual meaning—against the disruptive and excessive forces of the margin. Transgress the margin to which ornament is properly confined, as artists in virtually every medium available in nineteenth-century France did, and a series of crucial binary distinctions collapses, threatening not only the center, but ornament itself, which is defined by its limits, its position on a well-defined edge.What distinguished nineteenth-century French literature was, from Gordon’s point of view, a sustained interest, among critics as well as artists, in cultivating the creative possibilities opened up by compromising the boundary between ornament and its other. So fertile and successful has this project proven to be that today’s postmodernity has not come to an end of it, continuing to discover its most interesting possibilities on the margin. And within the field of art history, we see that ornament, once widely denigrated as the source of confusion, has become virtually orthodox; as the title of Ernst Gombrich’s book on the subject indicates, ornament is now held to appeal to and gratify The Sense of Order.Gordon takes advantage of the posthistory of her subject, applying to studies of Nerval, Mallarmé, Gautier, Huysmans a theoretical armature drawn from the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan. Drawing attention to a dimension of meaning or intention that has been “suppressed or excluded from the central field,” ornament, she argues, “anticipates the way psychiatry, perceptual psychology, and aesthetics converge in the fin de siècle.” Ornament, in other words, is cognate with the unconscious, and its prevalence in fin de siècle art and literature may be considered a sign of a certain cultural receptivity to the discoveries Freud was about to make, the “French” modality of a phenomenon to which Freud would give a “Viennese” formulation. [End Page 364]It is fashionable, especially in medieval studies, to focus on the disruptively counter-doctrinal potential of marginal elements such as gargoyles or textual illuminations. But Gordon generally argues another kind of case altogether, one that has, perhaps, even greater contemporary interest. Ornament, she claims, discloses the essential principles of aesthetic production. The expressive power of line, the “sense of order” to which it appeals, the subordination of literal depiction to design, the primacy of relationships over individual figures—all these reflect, as Wilhelm Worringer was explicitly to claim in 1908, energies deriving from the very beginnings of art itself.Thus, when principles and figures of ornament began to invade the “sense” or “business” of the text itself, as they did in nineteenth-century French literature, what is happening is not only a radical adjustment of a certain conception of ornament, but a large movement of return. Art becomes under these circumstances both decadent and primordial, devoting itself to both meaningless proliferation and to “pure art.” Gordon tracks this ambivalent movement with very considerable assurance and learning in an argument as sinuous as the ornamental line itself. The chapters on Nerval (“Lace as Textual Metaphor”) and Gautier (“Trills, Frills, and Decorative Frames for the Object of Desire”) are particularly illuminating, inspired by a kind of theoretical wit that does justice to their objects. Gordon is somewhat less successful in communicating the relevance to Mallarmé of Lacan, the exposition of whom—of which?—is laborious. But the responsibility probably lies more heavily with Lacan than with Gordon. Labored accounts of Lacan may even be considered as a species of ornament, a refinement and a new barbarism, peculiar to critical discourse in the fin of our own siècle.Geoffrey Galt HarphamTulane UniversityCopyright... (shrink)

The nature of fantasy has been little discussed, despite its importance in the arts. Its significance is brought out here in relation to the long‐standing debate on the alleged paradox of fiction—that we respond emotionally to characters and events known to be unreal. Examination of the paradox shows it to be ill founded once the nature of fantasy is appreciated. Moreover, a detailed consideration of fantasy shows that it can itself provide a plausible account of our emotional (...) reactions to creative literature, an account that, after a review of some possible objections, is then contrasted with the leading contemporary theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Fantasy Matters Too MuchJack Zipes (bio)In September 1997 a fairy-tale princess and a holy saint, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, died within a few days of each other. Millions of people openly and dramatically expressed their grief and mourning. Their pictures along with many different images of Diana and Mother Teresa were beamed all over the world through television and the Internet. The mass media carried all (...) sorts of stories and acclaimed the two of them as the fairy-tale princess and the saint, so that little was left to the imagination. Fantastic spectacle was all that mattered.We speculate with the fantastic. Fantasy is a celebrity and money-making machine. As a module in our brains, it has the capacity to transform plain junk into gold that glitters. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrate spectacles that exist and have always existed—illusions of social relations of exploitation based on power. Spectacles violate and drain our imaginations by glorifying social relations of power that are made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we don’t know, products that are not of our own making and that we consume mentally and physically. We reproduce images consciously and unconsciously that are not of our own making. The media and the corporate world occupy our psyches and manipulate our fantasies even when we [End Page 77] dream. Our relations are mediated through fantastic spectacle and through fetish abetted by the latest technology that connects us to each other while also disconnecting us from our minds and feelings. Simultaneously, we seek to project our desires in the form of fantasies onto reality and endeavor to occupy a space in which our most profound wishes and desires can be realized. We seek cognition and recognition. In each instance—in the tension between corporate determination of the fantastic and individual projection of desire—we seem to anchor our understanding of reality in artworks dependent on the fantastic, such as the Bible and fairy tales. Hence, Mother Teresa the saint. Diana the fairy-tale princess.It is through fantasy that we have always sought to make sense of the world, not through reason. Reason matters, but fantasy matters more. Perhaps it has mattered too much, and our reliance on fantasy may wear thin and betray us even while it nourishes us and gives us hope that the world can be a better place. We have imagined gods, the kingdom of a single god, the miraculous feats of divine and semidivine characters, and the commandments that have been established to lead us to the good life, if not paradise. It is through the fictive projections of our imaginations based on personal experience that we have sought to grasp, explain, alter, and comment on reality. This is again why such staples as the Bible and the Grimms fairy tales have become canonical texts: unlike reality, they allegedly open the mysteries of life and reveal ways in which we can maintain ourselves and our integrity in a conflict-ridden world. They compensate for the constant violation of nature and life itself and for the everyday violation of our lives engendered through spectacle. They contest reality and also become conflated with reality.But our fantasy and the fantasies that we conceive have become desperate because they are outstripped by real existing conditions that instrumentalize them at every waking second of our day, and even when we slumber. It is a commonplace today that fiction, especially science fiction and what we label fantasy in the world of art, cannot keep pace with the devastating and disturbing fantastic of real occurrences, or what I call the incredible credibility of the real. When the normal is so fantastically abnormal, what role can fantastic artworks play in our lives? Is the violence that we encounter in our everyday lives so much more fantastic than in literature, film, and the arts that we seek to consume the fantastic like harmless junk food as quick fixes and consolation? Can our joys really and realistically... (shrink)

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and (...) impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture. (shrink)

Is religion necessarily a form of fantasy, a superstitious childishness we should have put aside by now? If so, what takes the place of empty heaven? May idle dreams threaten secular moralities as much as they threaten religion ? If so, are there authentic forms of religion as well as authentic forms of morality which transcend these threats? He takes us on a journey from religion conceived as a 'somewhere over the rainbow, ' to possibilities of living under a (...) sacramental sky. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What is Fantasy?Brian Laetz and Joshua J. JohnstonWizards, elves, dragons, and trolls—this is certainly the stuff of fantasy, populating the fictions of such giants as Tolkien, no less than the juvenilia of many aspiring writers. However, it is much easier to identify typical elements of fantasy, than it is to understand the category of fantasy itself. There can be little doubt that, in practice, the (...) genre is pretty well defined, concretely manifesting itself in the shelves reserved for it in video shops and bookstores. But stating why a work belongs on these shelves, rather than those in the near vicinity, such as horror and science fiction, or those more remote, like plain old fiction, presents a real challenge. Certainly, a mere few feet could separate fantasy from the other shelves, but the conceptual distance those feet represent appears great indeed. What, if anything, distinguishes this genre from other categories of mass art. In other words, what is fantasy?To begin, fantasy is a transmedia genre, since there are fantasy novels and movies, for instance, as is illustrated by J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga and its recent cinematic adaptation. It is interesting to note that fantasy includes works from other media as well, such as paintings, which often accompany fantasy narratives, like Frank Frazetta's recognizable illustrations for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories. Forms of entertainment are also affiliated with the genre, such as role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, though one might balk at considering such things even forms of mass art? Nonetheless, despite the variety of media and entertainments associated with fantasy, [End Page 161] narratives occupy a fundamental place within the genre. For paintings, drawings, and the like are only recognizably fantastic given some narrative background that tells us what wizards, trolls, and dragons look like.1 Plausibly, it is what allows us to see that a drawing depicts an elf, for example, rather than a child with odd pointy ears. Thus, even if some works of fantasy are, strictly speaking, non-narrative, fantastic narratives remain fundamental, since these other works would not be classified as fantasy without them. This warrants initially setting aside things like fantasy games and paintings to focus on narratives. What, precisely, makes a narrative fantastic?First, fantastic narratives are essentially fictional. For regardless of how one ultimately understands the nature of fiction, the notion of true fantasy seems patently incoherent, quite unlike, say, true crime. And it must be stressed that this point should be compatible with any theory of fiction. Second, the sort of things that can make a work fantastic, like wizards and dragons, must be prominent in the work—they cannot be minor details. For example, had there been a two-minute scene in Spartacus in which someone cast a spell, the scene would have been fantastic, but ultimately the movie would not be classified any differently; you would still find it on the drama shelf. Moreover, this condition is not peculiar to fantasy.2 For instance, no one who has suffered through a Steven Seagal film would seriously classify it as romance or even action-romance, simply because it has a minor romantic subplot. Fantasy is no different from any other genre in this regard: whatever features define a genre must be prominent in a work in order for it to belong to the relevant genre. Third, the sort of content that can make a work fantastic must not solely be viewed as symbols for things that are not fantastic. In other words, these elements cannot just be taken as allegorical.3 This alone would seem to disqualify George Orwell's Animal Farm from the genre, since most read the intelligent animals as merely symbols portraying various factions in communist Russia. It should be noted that the actual intentions of the author probably matter little here. For example, even if scholars discovered that Tolkien merely intended the Middle Earth saga as an elaborate allegory, it would remain fantasy; few would be tempted to move the books to another shelf. Fourth, the relevant content must not solely be mocked or lampooned within the work.4 This is necessary... (shrink)

This article studies a new fantasy subgenre that emerged in contemporary China, xiuzhen xiaoshuo (immortality cultivation fiction), which builds imaginary worlds around the magical practice of Chinese alchemy and fuses it with science and technology. After the arrival of the modern, Western triad of science, religion, and magic/superstition, alchemical practices of the Daoist tradition were labeled as a “superstition” to be eradicated; however, they persisted and began to flourish within and beyond the realm of fantasy literature in the (...) late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Immortality cultivation fiction has generated a magical form of transhumanism, which envisions human enhancement through techniques beyond the boundaries of “proper” science and “legitimate” religion. While transhumanism in the Euro‐American West is popular among white bourgeoisie males and dominated by tendencies to reaffirm the human subject constructed by excluding the various subhuman others, magical transhumanism in Chinese fantasy explores the possibility of transcending that antagonistic relationship and making a posthuman subject and a utopian world. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s own interventions, these essays critically interrogate his ideas, challenging him to respond directly which (...) he does in an extended polemical reply that concludes the collection. This volume represents an exciting and important contribution to contemporary theoretical debate and adds significantly to the growing literature on Zizek. (shrink)

This case study describes a patient presenting with a long history of excessive daydreaming which has caused her distress but is not incident to any other apparent clinical psychiatric disorders. We have treated this patient for over 10 years, and she has responded favorably to fluvoxamine therapy, stating that it helps to control her daydreaming. Our patient, and other psychotherpists, have brought to our attention other possible cases of excessive daydreaming. We examine the available literature regarding daydreaming, mind wandering, and (...) fantasy proneness relative to current cognitive and neuroanatomical models of executive attention. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt and Zizek. On that basis we identify four dominant educational leadership discourses: a personhood-based discourse, a profession-based discourse, a standard-based discourse, and a resource-based discourse. These discourses have—as we will show—various consequences for the way we think (...) and talk about education and educational leadership in our age. Using examples that stem from a project about educational leadership in Danish upper secondary school, we will illustrate how educational leaders’ beings and doings are ‘regulated’ by these discourses, which place them in a tension field where different and conflicting fantasies seem to be played out. Then, we will discuss how these fantasies can be challenged and how we can think and speak more intellectually about education and educational leadership. By using the term intellectual we are referring to educational leaders’ ability as human beings to critically reflect on their contemporary doings and beings within and beyond the existing social order. Hopefully this can help them to establish new ways for discussing not only what educational leadership is and should be about, but also what it could be about. (shrink)

This article explores the legacy of ancient Egypt in popular culture, from the 19th century onwards - through the theme of consumption. A range of media is covered including literature, film and performance. I argue that Egypt has been a constant mirror for contemporary culture in terms of the body, sexuality and the Orient. In the West, Egyptian bodies have always been consumed, literally or metaphorically and in the 1990s a commodified Egypt has to extend beyond normative sexuality. Thus, Egypt (...) has to be queered and to illustrate this ultimate process of othering I consider the film, Stargate. (shrink)

"[This book] is a fascinating look at the fantasy and philosophy of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The two men were friends and fellow professors at Oxford, renowned Christian thinkers who both 'found it necessary to create for the purposes of their fiction other worlds—not utopias or dystopias, but different worlds.'" --.

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Medical accounts of the absence of conscience are intriguing for the way they seem disposed to drift away from the ideal of scientific objectivity and towards fictional representations of the subject. I examine here several contemporary accounts of psychopathy by Robert Hare and Paul Babiak. I first note how they locate the truth about their subject in fiction, then go on to contend that their accounts ought to be thought of as a “mythos,” for they betray a telling uncertainty about (...) where “fact” ends and “fantasy” begins, as well as the means of distinguishing mental health from mental illness in regard to some social roles. (shrink)

Joan Scott’s ‘fantasy echo’ is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism’s failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi’s ‘American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide’ (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi’s primary argument – that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress – unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and ignores the prominent role spectacle culture plays in the circumscription of contemporary feminism. Building upon Scott’s attention (...) to literature to interrupt fantasy echoes and their inert visions of how feminism should appear, the article interprets The Portrait of a Lady (1908) through the tools of Scott’s historiography. I argue that Henry James’s novel, focused on an American ‘New Woman’, is an early account of how young women are sold fantasies of feminist freedom through spectacle culture and troubles the assumption that older women only forge benevolent relationships with younger women out of generosity. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Walt Disney’s movie, The Pagemaster (1994) begins on a dark and stormy night, with a young boy stumbling into an immense, gothic-styled library for refuge from the rain. Once inside, he is soon carried away by a tumultuous river of coloured paints, transformed into an animated characterization of himself, and thrust into an animated world of literature, where he battles Captain Hook, flees Moby Dick, and participates in other classic tales of adventure, horror, and fantasy. -/- Adults might understand (...) the film as a fanciful description of how they feel when reading a lively book. Although they would probably not imagine themselves tagging along with the animated characters like a 4th musketeer, they might very well claim that they enter a fiction through the viewpoint of one or more of the characters, experiencing, imaginatively, mental images of the sights, sounds, smells, and movements that the character would experience. Under this description, the reader would be forming multi- modal images that would correspond directly to what the literary characters are doing, thinking, and experiencing. When a fictional hero whips out his sword and slashes a rope in half, the reader might form a visual image of the hero’s determined face, an auditory image of the sound of the whizzing sword, and a motor image of an extended arm movement. I call such an imitative participation, by use of mental images in any modality, a simulation. -/- I suggest that this imitative experiencing of a fiction through the production of multi-modal imagery - a simulation - is not the only way in which readers might engage a literary text. In this paper I explore the hypothesis that readers might use their own bodily processes - those of the somato-viscero-motor system (SVM) for a non-imitative activity that I call a reinterpretation and that the reinterpretation might make a distinctive contribution to the reading process. As an example of a simulation and a reinterpretation, take the SVM experience of the reader’s breathing. A simulation would occur if the text describes a character who is taking deep breaths of air and the reader creates a mental image representing the experience of breathing. In this case, the reader’s mental image of breathing would stand for a property of the literary work - the fictional experience of breathing. -/- By contrast to the simulation, a reinterpretation would occur if the text describes a character who is gazing at long, wispy clouds that extend outward from a horizon and the reader uses his own experience of breathing to stand for the visual sense of looking at a long, continuous expanse of filmy white: the reader’s actual breathing would stand for a property of the literary work - the fictional experience of seeing. Breathing is not the same as seeing. This should help clarify the following definition. -/- I hypothesize that a reinterpretation occurs when the reader becomes aware of some component of the SVM system and reinterprets it as a property of the literary work that is not the same as that particular SVM process. The SVM experience is projected into the literary work. (shrink)

Epidemiology is a field torn between practices of surveillance and methods of analysis. Since the onset of COVID-19, epidemiological expertise has been mostly identified with the first, as dashboards of case and mortality rates took centre stage. However, since its establishment as an academic field in the early 20th century, epidemiology’s methods have always impacted on how diseases are classified, how knowledge is collected, and what kind of knowledge was considered worth keeping and analysing. Recent advances in digital epidemiology, this (...) article argues, are not just a quantitative expansion of epidemiology’s scope, but a qualitative extension of its analytical traditions. Digital epidemiology is enabled by deep and digital phenotyping, the large-scale re-purposing of any data scraped from the digital exhaust of human behaviour and social interaction. This technological innovation is in need of critical examination, as it poses a significant epistemic shift to the production of pathological knowledge. This article offers a critical revision of the key literature in this budding field to underline the extent to which digital epidemiology is envisioned to redefine the classification and understanding of disease from the ground up. Utilising analytical tools from science and technology studies, the article demonstrates the disruptive expectations built into this expansion of epidemiological surveillance. Given the sweeping claims and the radical visions articulated in the field, the article develops a tentative critique of what I call a fantasy of pathological omniscience; a vision of how data-driven engineering seeks to capture and resolve illness in the world, past, present and future. (shrink)

Tolkien is one of our most beloved fantasy writers. Such was the power of his imagination that much has been written on his invented world, languages, and myth. This book is an invitation to tread the paths of Tolkien's realm, exploring three regions of his work: language, myth, and imagination. We will be looking for a path leading to a summit from where we can view Tolkien's whole realm. Yannick Imbert argues that we can gain such a view only (...) if we understand Tolkien's philosophical theology, his Thomism. To attain this vantage point and better understand the genius of his Middle Earth, readers journey with Tolkien through his academic, personal, and theological milieu, which together formed his Thomistic imagination."--Amazon. (shrink)

Introduction: De disciplina scolarium and the Boethian corpus -- Reproduction and philosophical life in the Consolatio philosophiae -- De disciplina and Translatio studii -- Boethian humor -- "Bitwixen game and ernest": contrary Boethianism in Troilus and Criseyde -- Boethius and the humanists: Valla, Badius, and persistence of De disciplina in print.

As with a previous colloquium at Moscow in 2004, when my topic was literature in the Federal Republic of Germany during the post-World War II decades, I want to speak about tensions between war and postwar generations in Russia and in Germany, and my perspective will again be largely autobiographical. Of course this convergence (bordering on repetition) is not random. For I believe that remarkably complex affinities exist between Germany after the twelve-year-short nightmare of National Socialism and Russia after the (...) long stagnation of the Soviet Union. In both cases, a national collapse made cultural circles and newly elected governments…. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabaté subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred action, (...) class='Hi'>fantasy, hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabaté demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation. (shrink)

This paper starts from a premise relating to the act of fictional writing about eugenics and the way it may be understood as the embodiment and enactment of social imaginaries. It proposes that literature frequently, if not habitually, expresses the underside of what is expressed in public discourse. That is, far from being the implement of state policy or intervention, it acts in counterpoint to the state, constituting a type of social fantasy in that it explores through the realm (...) of the imagination what might happen. It becomes the arena for contestation, exploration, and nuancing as it essays how ideas from public, ‘real’ life, might transform when acted out. The paper considers two sorts of literary case. First it looks at that of ‘naïve’ literature, harnessed unashamedly to a specific sociological discourse of eugenics. Then, using primarily Ibsen, it considers a subset, the case of literature that does not set out to be explicitly in the service of the cause of eugenics, but is appropriated and disseminated from a platform of eugenics. Lastly, taking the example of Unamuno’s Amor y pedagogía the paper considers literature that exists in a quite different sphere of public awareness. It shows awareness of the arguments and precepts of eugenics and related beliefs and practices, but acts as a transitional space to enable such ideas to be entertained and thought about, without a requirement of acceptance or belief. (shrink)

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from Aretino and Tullia d'Aragona in 16th century Italy to Pepys, Rochester, and Behn in late 17th century England. James Turner explores the idea of sexual education, from the (...) simple instructional dialogue to the advanced experiments of the philosophical libertine, analysing the hard-core curiculum that defined sexuality centuries before the Marquis de Sade. He shows how close, nuanced readings of neglected but compelling texts - like the searingly explicit Alcibiade fanciullo, L'escole des filles, and Aloisia Sigea - link them to larger issues of gender politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, sexual history, medical science, mind-body philosophy, and the educational revolution. (shrink)