The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis Cambridge Introductions to Literature Series

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, 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.

1. Freud's theater of the unconscious: Oedipus, Hamlet, and 'Hamlet'; 2. Literature and fantasy: towards a grammar of the subject; 3. From the uncanny to the unhomely; 4. Psychoanalysis and the paranoid critique of pure literature; 5. The literary phallus, from Poe to Gide; 6. A thing of beauty is a Freud for ever: Joyce with Jung and Freud, Lacan, and Borges; 7. From the history of perversion to the trauma of history.

Jean-Michel Rabaté is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. He is also founder and senior curator of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, where he organizes exhibitions, conferences and lectures. Since 2008, Rabaté has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also on the editorial boards of Interfaces, James Joyce Quarterly, the James Joyce Annual, the European Journal of English Studies, Modernism/Modernity, English Text Construction, and Word and Image. Rabaté currently serves on the board of the University of Pennsylvania Press.