In contemporary academic literary studies, Lacan is often considered impenetrably obscure, due to the unavailability of his late works, insufficient articulation of his methodologies and sometimes stereotypical use of Lacanian concepts in literary theory. This study aims to integrate Lacan into contemporary literary study by engaging with a broad range of Lacanian theoretical concepts, often for the first time in English, and using them to analyse a range of key texts from different periods. Azari explores Lacan's theory of desire as well as his final theories of lituraterre, littoral, and the sinthome and interrogates a range of poststructuralist interpretive approaches. In the second part of the book, he outlines the variety of ways in which Lacanian theory can be applied to literary texts and offers detailed readings of texts by Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery. This ground-breaking study provides original insights into a number of the most influential intellectual discussions in relation to Lacan and will fill a recognised gap in understanding Lacan and his legacy for literary study and criticism.

An original study aiming to explain fully Lacanian thought and apply it to the study of literary texts.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis and American Literature considers the psychoanalytic applications of three classic works of nineteenth-century literature, applying Lacanian concepts throughout. Moncayo imports the dynamisms and texture of three English and American stories with the aim of developing psychoanalytic theory, rather than simply confirming or applying previously adopted psychoanalytic concepts and theory. The author begins with The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe, assessing the differences between Derrida's and Lacan’s analysis of this famous story. The book then considers The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, using James’ text for an in-depth analysis of Lacan’s Seminar on the Logic of the Fantasy, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, considering "passage à l'acte", and the objet a as the Wind and Heart of the Signifier. The authors use Lacan’s later theories to cast a new interpretative light on the stories, much as Lacan himself did with the work of James Joyce. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and American Literature will be of interest to academics and scholars of literary studies, psychoanalytic and Lacanian studies, and Philosophy.

Lacan in Public argues that Lacan’s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is, in fact, the central concern of Lacan’s entire body of work. Scholars typically cite Jacques Lacan as a thinker primarily concerned with issues of desire, affect, politics, and pleasure. And though Lacan explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric, rhetoricians have been hesitant to embrace the French thinker both because his writing is difficult and because Lacan’s conception of rhetoric runs counter to the American traditions of rhetoric in composition and communication studies. Lacan’s conception of rhetoric, Christian Lundberg argues in Lacan in Public, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies—that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the real-world circumstances it attempts to describe. As Lundberg shows, Lacan’s work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current rhetorical scholarship, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of rhetoric and agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion.

Literature and Theory is designed to assist students to apply key critical theories to literary texts. Focusing on representative works and authors widely taught across classrooms in the world – Joyce, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, and Octavia Butler – it picks up different aspects of studying literature in an accessible format. The volume also brings together chapters that represent major modern literary schools of thought, including structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, as well as culture studies.

The Major Literary Seminars of Jacques Lacan considers the three key phases of Lacan’s interest in literary topics. Santanu Biswas first examines the seminars given between 1955 and 1961, in which Lacan spoke on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story "The Purloined Letter", Hamlet, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Paul Claudel’s The Coûfontaine Trilogy, and where literature is related to meaning. This is followed by an exploration of Lacan’s seminar on "Lituraterre" in 1971, wherein Lacan elaborates on the different ways in which literature appeared to turn towards lituraterre. Finally, Biswas considers Lacan’s 1975–1976 seminar on James Joyce, who created literature out of “litter” and was concerned with jouissance rather than with meaning. The Major Literary Seminars of Jacques Lacan will be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts, other mental health practitioners interested in the teachings of Lacan, and academics and students of Lacanian studies, literature, and psychoanalysis.

Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.

This book uses clinical psychoanalytic theory to illustrate how early British Gothic fiction reveals undercurrents of psychopathological behavior. It demonstrates that psychological insights gained from Gothic romance anticipate the later scientific findings of psychoanalysis. Chapters consider the division of the Gothic novel's critical reception between allegory and romance; how the structure of early British Gothic romance parallels Freud's notion of the uncanny; the genre's perverse origins in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto; sexual differentiation and the parallel between development of Gothic romance an development of the psyche; Ann Radcliffe and the terror of hysteria; Matthew Lewis and obsessional neurosis; and the confusion between self and other in Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Some of the most well-known psychoanalysts and literary theorists explore Jacques Lacan's influence on literature. The relationship between literature and psychology is long and richly complex, and no more so than in the work of Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. The Literary Lacan: From Literature to "Lituraterre" and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan's significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan's literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, his concept of Lituraterre, and his seminar on James Joyce. Other essays examine Lacan's theories in conjunction with the works of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. The book concludes with essays that investigate Lacan and literature more broadly, including the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis. With well-known contributors including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques-Alain Miller, Russell Grigg, and Ellie Ragland, this volume will appeal not only to specialists in literary and Lacanian theory but also to students and enthusiasts of the master and the literature that inspired him.

Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan’s career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to replace rampant individualism with a heightened social consciousness. Widely recognized as the leading authority on Lacan, Élisabeth Roudinesco revisits his life and work: what it was – and what it remains.