The Literary Freud

by Meisel; Perry

• ISBN13: 9780415981453
• ISBN10: 041598145X
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-12-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this book, Perry Meisel argues that Freud's texts are properly literary, and casts Freud as both literary theoretician and practitioner. Here, after an introductory reception history of Freud as literature, Meisel provides a series of close readings of Freud's major texts that take literary representation as their central focus. As for Freud's influence on others, it, too, is structured like a literary history, argues Meisel. He discusses Freud's influence on modernism, Strachey's Standard Edition (once again the subject of debate with the recent Penguin retranslations), and Freud's influence on Michel Foucault. Finally, we explore the relationship of Freud and literature. Does an understanding of how Freud himself writes and influences help us to read literature and interpret it anew?

Author Biography

Perry Meisel is Professor of English at New York University

Table of Contents

Textual note	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Reception history	p. 1
The critical tradition	p. 1
The artistic tradition	p. 3
Myth or language?	p. 8
"Prior to any mentality"	p. 11
Mythic identification	p. 13
"The mechanism of the trap"	p. 16
Symbolic action	p. 18
"A science of tropes"	p. 21
Deconstructing the drive	p. 24
Past and present in poems and in persons	p. 30
Beyond formalism	p. 35
"Sensations" and "ideas"	p. 39
Doublings	p. 39
Deferred action and the belated paradigm of the Wolf Man	p. 42
Bergson and the Project	p. 47
Tissues, texts, and trauma: Studies on Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams	p. 57
Psychoanalysis and its vicissitudes	p. 64
The figure of the father	p. 74
Psychoanalysis and aestheticism	p. 81
"Constancy" and chiasmus	p. 81
Psychoanalysis and aestheticism	p. 89
A supplement to the history of psychoanalysis and modernism	p. 95
Modernism and psychoanalysis	p. 95
James and James	p. 96
"The life of the blood"	p. 99
"The mythical method"	p. 102
"This double life"	p. 108
Strachey the Apostle	p. 117
Discipleship	p. 117
English Freud	p. 122
A moveable feast	p. 128
Freud and Foucault	p. 133
Typhoon	p. 133
Foucault's republic	p. 134
Foucault's primal scene	p. 138
Representation and resistance in Mansfield, James, and Hardy	p. 143
Psychoanalysis and literature	p. 143
The status of the reader	p. 144
Mansfield and resistance	p. 146
Semiosis and judgment in Henry James	p. 152
The conversation	p. 156
Reading as a mechanism of defense	p. 159
Biography and literary history	p. 161
What is an author?	p. 161
"Or someone else"?	p. 164
The professional	p. 166
The ontology of the pornographic image	p. 173
Reading pornography	p. 173
A teleology of pornography	p. 175
Faith and faithlessness in A Lost Lady	p. 176
Pornography and the primal scene	p. 180
The pathos of the porn star	p. 189
Freud, Bakhtin, Shakespeare	p. 193
What is representation?	p. 193
Freud and Bakhtin	p. 197
Shakespeare and Freud	p. 201
Works cited	p. 203
Index	p. 211
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