Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading is a literary critic's approach to the range of meanings and activities involved in reading, understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. In thematically linked essays, the author explores writing by novelists such as Austen, Rousseau, and Woolf, as well as fictional accounts of slavery and Holocaust memoirs.

About the author

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

Summary

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.

Additional text

Offers a new approach to reading with ramifications that go beyond the Romantic texts which are her main (but not exclusive) focus

Product details

• Authors: Mary Jacobus, Mary (Anderson Professor of English and Women's Studies Jacobus, Jacobus Mary
• Publisher: Oxford Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 26.08.1999
• EAN: 9780198184348
• ISBN: 978-0-19-818434-8
• Dimensions: 143 mm x 224 mm x 19 mm
• Weight: 414 g
• Illustrations: four-colour frontispiece
• Series: Clarendon Lectures in English; Clarendon Lectures in English, 1997; Clarendon Lectures in English
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, Literacy, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Literacy, Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology, Literary theory, Psychoanalytical theory (Freudian psychology), PSYCHOLOGY / Psychotherapy / Psychoanalysis