Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative - Rilegato

Rashkin, Esther

9780691069517: Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691069514 ISBN 13: 9780691069517

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1992

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'lsle-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.

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Contenuti:

	Acknowledgments
	Note on Documentation
	Introduction: Character Analysis, Unspeakable Secrets, and the Formation of Narrative	3
Ch. 1	For a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Works of Abraham and Torok	13
Ch. 2	The Ghost of a Secret: Psychoanalytic Allegory in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer	49
Ch. 3	The Interred Sign: L'intersigne by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam	64
Ch. 4	Legacies of Gold: Honore de Balzac's Facino Cane	81
Ch. 5	In the Mind's I: The Jolly Corner of Henry James	93
Ch. 6	A Meeting of the Minds: Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher	123
	Conclusion	156
	Notes	167
	Index	201