Rereading Shepard draws together 13 original theoretical perspectives on one of America's most important contemporary playwrights. Representing a range of critical appraoches - including semiotics, deconstruction, and feminism - the essays address recent debates emerging in Shepard criticism. These include the status of Shepard's texts within the modernist tradition on the one hand and a developing post-modernism on the other, and the feminist debate over Shepard's drama - does it reinforce a masculinist world or does it provide some oppositional stance toward patriarchal 'master narratives'?

Few American playwrights have exerted as much influence on the contemporary stage as Sam Shepard. His plays are performed on and off Broadway and in all the major regional American theatres. They are also widely performed and studied in Europe, particularly in Britain, Germany and France, finding both a popular and scholarly audience. In this collection of seventeen original essays, American and European authors from different professional and academic backgrounds explore the various aspects of Shepard s career - his plays, poetry, music, fiction, acting, directing and film work. The volume covers the major plays, including Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West, as well as other lesser known but vitally important works. A thorough chronology of Shepard s life and career, together with biographical chapters, a note from the legendary Joseph Chaikin, and an interview with the playwright, give a fascinating first-hand account of an exuberant and experimental personality.

A daring new view of Sebald's works and the reading practice they call forth. W. G. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany. He found his way as a young academic to England and a career as professor of German. Only between the late 1980s and his untimely death in 2001 did he concentrate on nonacademic writing, crafting a new kind of prose work that shares features with but remains distinct from the novel, essay, travel writing, and memoir forms and gaining elevation to the first rank of writers internationally. No less a critic than Susan Sontag was moved to ask "Is literary greatness still possible?," implying that it was and that she had found it embodied in his writing. Deane Blackler explores Sebald's biography before analyzing the reading practice his textscall forth: that of a "disobedient reader," a proactive reader challenged to question the text by Sebald's peculiar use of poetic language, the pseudoautobiographical voice of his narrators, the seemingly documentary photographs he inserted into his books, and by his exquisite representations of place. Blackler reads Sebald's fiction as adventurous and disobedient in its formulation, an imaginative revitalization of literary fiction for the third millennium. Deane Blackler received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2005 from the University of Tasmania.

The Écrits was Jacques Lacan’s single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan’s Écrits to be published in English. An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century, Lacan’s Écrits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries – by some of the world’s most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars – on the complete edition of the Écrits, inclusive of lesser known articles such as ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘The Youth of Gide’, ‘Science and Truth’, ‘Presentation on Transference’ and ‘Beyond the "Reality Principle". The originality and importance of Lacan’s Écrits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the text’s notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacan's magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts. Reading Lacan’s Écrits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacan’s pivotal work.

This book claims that Keats’s poetry is a reaction against the discourse of modernity which traumatized the human subject by creating a divide between human and nature, subject and object. It argues that by transcending this divide and acknowledging the agency of both subject and object, Keats makes an ideological statement and offers a new site of existence or relationality to readers. This site also implies a response to the accusations that the Romantics were not interested in the realities of their time. What Keats does is to give an aestheticized response to the hardcore facts of his time. Departing from previous studies due to its emphasis on subjectivity and relationality, the book discusses Keats with regard to post/non-anthropocentric, alternative subject positions and subject-object relations in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” “In drear nighted December,” “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” “Lamia,” “La Belle Dame sans Mercy,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Drawing on Lacanian and Braidottian epistemologies in its discussion of the intricacy between the imaginary and the symbolic, the irruption of the psychotic into the symbolic, and the agency of the object on the subject in Keats’s poetry, the book suggests that the inner dynamics of both the subject and the object acquire agency, which shatters Oneness and totality assumed in the Cartesian self.

One of the most exciting and produced American playwrights of the second half of this century, Sam Shepard's writing career began in 1964 and continues today. This book examines the playwright's canon first from the perspective of dramatic analysis and intertextuality in terms of theme and performance vocabulary, then from the director's perspective in interpretation for performance. The book is useful to the scholar, the theatre professional, and the theatre goer. Shepard's dramaturgy is analyzed both in terms of dramatic and cinematic influences and of its originality. The author examines how Shepard has synthesized these influences into the unique contemporary dramatic form which Graham terms «Metarealism.»

In Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History, Christine van Boheemen-Saaf examines the relationship between Joyce's postmodern textuality and the traumatic history of colonialism in Ireland. Joyce's influence on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derrida's philosophy, Van Boheemen-Saaf suggests, ought to be viewed from a postcolonial perspective. She situates Joyce's writing as a practice of indirect 'witnessing' to a history that remains unspeakable. The loss of a natural relationship to language in Joyce calls for a new ethical dimension in the process of reading. The practice of reading becomes an act of empathy to what the text cannot express in words. In this way, she argues, Joyce's work functions as a material location for the inner voice of Irish cultural memory. This book engages with a wide range of contemporary critical theory and brings Joyce's work into dialogue with thinkers such as Zizek, Adorno, Lyotard, as well as feminism and postcolonial theory.

This volume, the second of two, contains the proceedings of the Shepard conference organized in Brussels, 28-30 May 1993, by the Belgian-Luxembourg American Studies Association and the Free University of Brussels.