Read more
This book is an interdisciplinary study of the human drama of replacement. Is one's irreplaceability dependent on surrounding oneself by a replication of others? Is love intrinsically repetitious or built on a fantasy of uniqueness? The sense that a person's value is blotted out if someone takes their place can be seen in the serial monogamy of our age and in the lives of 'replacement children' - children born into a family that has recently lost a child, whom they may even be named after. The book investigates various forms of replacement, including AI and doubling, incest and bedtricks, imposters and revenants, human rights and 'surrogacy', and intertextuality and adaptation. The authors highlight the emotions of betrayal, jealousy and desire both within and across generations. On Replacement consists of 24 essays divided into seven sections: What is replacement?, Law & society, Wayward women, Lost children, Replacement films, The Holocaust and Psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to anyone engaged in reading cultural and social representations of replacement.
List of contents
1. Naomi Segal and Jean Owen, Introduction.- 2. Section I: What is replacement?. Naomi Segal, 'An eye for an eye' or 'a mile to a mile': versions of replacement.- 3. Jean Owen, Replaced mothers, bedtricks and daughters out of place.- 4. J. P. C. Brown, Replacement, renewal and redundancy.- 5. Section II: Lost children. Olivia Noble Gunn, Lost boys in Little Eyolf.- 6. Jean Owen, The Sisters Antipodes: replacement and its ripples of sibling rivalry.- 7. Georgia Panteli, Artificial intelligence and synthetic humans: loss and replacement.- 8. Section III: Wayward Women. Marija Dalbello, The metaphysics of replacement in photoplay novels of immigration.- 9. Patrizia Grimaldi-Pizzorno, Of ghosts and girls in Ulysses 13.- 10. Mary Hamer, Medea: founder member of the first wives' club.- 11. Nagihan Haliloglu, Replacement and genealogy in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.- 12. Section IV: Law & society. Samantha Ashenden, Who is the 'real' mother? Replacement and the politics of surrogacy.- 13. Sarah Trotter, The ethos of replaceability in European human rights law.- 14. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Remembering the disappeared in Lita Stantics Un muro de silencio.- 15. Section V: Replacement films. Andrew Asibong, Deadness, replacement and the divinely new: 45 Years.- 16. Laura Mulvey, 'She was the most beautiful creature I ever saw': visualising replacement in Hitchcock's Rebecca.- 17. Agnieszka Piotrowska, Married to the Eiffel Tower: notes on love, loss and replacement.- 18. Naomi Segal, 'That's my son': replacement, jealousy and sacrifice in Un Secret.- 19. Section VI: The Holocaust. Susanne Baackmann, Replacement as personal haunting in recent postmemory works.- 20. Monika Loewy, Embodying her ghost: self-replacement in Petzold's Phoenix.- 21. Anthony Rudolf, Replacement or ever-present: Jerzyk, Irit and Miriam.- 22. Section VII: Psychoanalysis. Agnieszka Piotrowska, Replacement and reparation in Sarah Polley's Stories we tell.- 23. Odeya Kohen Raz and Sandra Meiri, Replacement, objet a and the dynamic of desire/fantasy in Rebecca.- 24. Deborah Wright, Rooms as replacements for people: the consulting-room as a room object.
About the author
Dr Jean Owen is an independent researcher based in London, UK. Her academic interests lie in feminist theory, incest studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology, narrative traditions, and first-person writing. She has published articles on Anaïs Nin, Kathryn Harrison and Krys Lee.
Professor Naomi Segal researches in comparative literature, psychoanalysis and the body at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her most recent monographs are
Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch(2009) and
André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy(1998). She has run
Cultural Literacy in Europe(http://cleurope.eu/) since its origin in 2007.
Summary
This book is an interdisciplinary study of the human drama of replacement. Is one’s irreplaceability dependent on surrounding oneself by a replication of others? Is love intrinsically repetitious or built on a fantasy of uniqueness? The sense that a person’s value is blotted out if someone takes their place can be seen in the serial monogamy of our age and in the lives of ‘replacement children’ – children born into a family that has recently lost a child, whom they may even be named after. The book investigates various forms of replacement, including AI and doubling, incest and bedtricks, imposters and revenants, human rights and ‘surrogacy’, and intertextuality and adaptation. The authors highlight the emotions of betrayal, jealousy and desire both within and across generations. On Replacement consists of 24 essays divided into seven sections: What is replacement?, Law & society, Wayward women, Lost children, Replacement films, The Holocaust and Psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to anyone engaged in reading cultural and social representations of replacement.
