In a draft attached to a letter to his friend and confidante Wilhelm Fliess (May 31, 1897), Freud develops an idea: The mechanism of fiction is the same as that of hysterical fantasies. He supports this thought with a brief analysis of the biographical sources of Goethe's Werther. A few months later, on October 15, 1897, Freud mails Fliess a detailed account of remembered events from his childhood that, Freud believed, underlined the universality of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud's foray into literature initiated the beginning of a new critical approach. In Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, Emanuel Berman presents classic and contemporary papers written at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. In bringing these essays together Berman traces the development of a discipline that has often been plagued by a polarization between self-confident, single-minded psychoanalysts reading literature as a series of case studies and literary loyalists who cling to manifest content or to the declared intentions of the authors, accepting them at face value and depriving the work of its emotional complexity. Berman covers the full range of old and new perspectives, and presents selections from today's mature phase. This collection includes papers by Sigmund Freud, Steven Marcus, Patrick J. Mahoney, Donald Spence, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Ernst Kris, Phyllis Greenacre, Florence Bonime and Maryanne Eckardt, David Werman, Ellen Handler Spitz, Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Norman N. Holland, Roy Schafer, Meredith Anne Skura, Gail S. Reed, Francis Baudry, Rivka R. Eifermann, and Bennett Simon.

This collection of psychoanalytic readings of literary texts and literary readings of psychoanalytic texts has been carefully designed to work as an effective teaching text for introducing students to the complexities of psychoanalytic theory in practice. The texts selected are widely studied and map the development of the field from Freud up to the most contemporary work.

The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000 is a collection of the most influential writings on the theory of the novel from the twentieth century. Traces the rise of novel theory and the extension of its influence into other disciplines, especially social, cultural and political theory. Broad in scope, including sections on formalism; the Chicago School; structuralism and narratology; deconstruction; psychoanalysis; Marxism; social discourse; gender; post-colonialism; and more. Includes whole essays or chapters wherever possible. Headnotes introduce and link each piece, enabling readers to draw connections between different schools of thought. Encourages students to approach theoretical texts with confidence, applying the same skills they bring to literary texts. Includes a volume introduction, a selected bibliography, an index of topics and short author biographies to support study.

The essays in this collection, first published in 1987, represent a collective attempt to listen with the third ear to the underhand ways the unspoken has of speaking, and to speak of these ways. By focusing on ‘discourse’ the volume is distinguished from traditional literature by its emphasis on rhetorical structures and textual strategies, and the investment of these structures with desire, power and other aspects of subjectivity, rather than the personality of the artist or the creative process. However, in this book the human dimension is not lost. By claiming that the structures in question are not merely linguistic, semiotic, or narratological (although they are all of these), the human dimension is returned- not ‘in the raw’, as in traditional approaches, but through the traces it leaves in the text, as activated by its reading. This book is ideal for students of literature and psychoanalytical theory.

Teresa De Lauretis makes a bold and orginal argument for the renewed relevance of the Freudian theory of drives, through close readings of texts ranging from cinema and literature to psychoanalysis and cultural theory.

Combining literature and psychoanalysis, this collection foregrounds the work of literary creators as foundational to psychoanalysis.

At a time when psychoanalysis is attacked by biologists, psychologists and literary critics alike, this book offers a radical defence. Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind gives a clear introduction to the theories of Freud and Jung, the strange linguistic rewriting of Freud by Jacques Lacan. It explores the extraordinary variety of ways in which these writings have been applied to literature and literary theory. But for the first time, they are put in the context of recent biological theories of mind and sexuality.

At last available in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, the columbia critical guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on one or more texts by a given writer. each volume: -- Offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources -- Explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students to grasp the central issues for each work -- Is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work in question -- Includes notes and a comprehensive bibliography and index. With the publication of the scarlet letter in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne achieved not only critical recognition in his native New England but also an undisputed place amongst the newly emerging ranks of great American writers. This guide introduces and sets in context the enormous range of critical arguments that have been generated by this enduring work. From the comments and reviews of Hawthorne's contemporaries through discussions of the novel by fellow artists such as Henry James and D. H. Lawrence to radical re-readings of the postwar decades, the reader is given an invaluable guide to the critical progress of this key American text.

The book explores what it means for a human organism to be a “subject” and responds to what it sees as the contemporary ablation of subjectivity in favour of an impoverished “biopolitics” (a concept borrowed from Foucault). It is preoccupied with questions of ethics and education, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis, like Freirean literacy, constitutes first and foremost an education in responsible subjecthood. It identifies such an education as a very necessary intervention in what appears to be a global double bind between fanatical certainty and capitalist abstraction. The book asserts that, contrary to most trends concerning the appropriation of psychoanalysis or Freirean techniques for teaching, Freirean pedagogy and Lacanian psychoanalysis are not purely “toolboxes” but profound epistemological and philosophical arguments. These arguments also combine to suggest a new socio-political conception of theology. In addition the book draws on examples from literature and popular culture to explicate certain ideas. In this regard the book primarily undertakes a reading of selected works by J.M. Coetzee.