
Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading
Mary Jacobus(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 26. August 1999
Book
Hardback
254 pages
978-0-19-818434-8 (ISBN)
Description
Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading explores some of the ways in which we think about reading and the effects reading has on us. Whether considered as a process, a representation, or a cultural activity, reading involves the idea about inner and outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of thoughts and feelings between one person or historical period and another. These ideas provide the basis for much of our thinking about subjectivity and receive their fullest elaboration in the twentieth-century discourse of psychoanalysis. Drawing on the rich tradition of British object relations, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading is a literary critics approach to the scene of reading understood from a pyschoanalytic perspective. Linked essays on books and interiority, memory and landscape, trauma and literary transmission provide a subtle account of writing by Woolf, Austen, Rousseau, and Romantic women, as well as fictional accounts of slavery and colonialism, and Holocaust memoirs.
Reviews / Votes
It is utopian deconstruction that Jacobus begins to unpack in these essays. In the process she opens up a rich field of possibilities, including the extension of her approach from reading to writing (often implicit in her analyses), the question of what it is in (much) Romantic writing that is uniquely consonant with such an approach, and (as my last comments suggest) the thinking of this transitional reading/writing between psychoanaysis and other theoretical discourses * The Wordsworth Circle, Vol.XXXII, No.428/05/2002 * Offers a new approach to reading with ramifications that go beyond the Romantic texts which are her main (but not exclusive) focus * The Wordsworth Circle, Vol.XXXII, No.4 *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
four-colour frontispiece
Dimensions
Height: 224 mm
Width: 143 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
414 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-818434-8 (9780198184348)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
1989: Anderson Professor of English and Women's Studies, Cornell University
1982-89: Professor of English, Cornell University
1980-82: Associate Professor of English, Cornell University
1972-80: Lecturer, English Faculty, Oxford University
1971-80: Fellow and Tutor in English, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University
1970-71: Lecturer, University of Manchester
1968-70: Randall McIver Junior Research Fellowship, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University
1982-89: Professor of English, Cornell University
1980-82: Associate Professor of English, Cornell University
1972-80: Lecturer, English Faculty, Oxford University
1971-80: Fellow and Tutor in English, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University
1970-71: Lecturer, University of Manchester
1968-70: Randall McIver Junior Research Fellowship, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University
Author
Anderson Professor of English and Women's StudiesAnderson Professor of English and Women's Studies, Cornell University
Content
Introduction ; PART I: SCENES OF READING ; 1. The Room in the Book: Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading ; 2. A Whole World in Your Head: Rereading the Landscape of Absence ; PART II: READING TRAUMA ; 3. White Skin, Black Masks: Reading with Different Eyes ; 4. Border Crossings: Traumatic Reading and Holocaust Memory ; PART III: ROMANTIC WOMEN ; 5. Guilt that Wants a Name: Mary Shelley's Unreadability ; 6. Traces of an Accusing Spirit: Mary Hays and the Vehicular State