Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film – eBook

Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, (PDF) a set of specially commissioned essays provides a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches influenced by Lacanian theory, post-colonial studies, queer studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed an amazing return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed lately, and we need to understand why.

In Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory), the fourteen essays make use of recently minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texttooks, films, and social practices. The prominent authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, Korea, India, China, Belgium, Greece, Australia, France, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, postcolonial studies, feminism, and trauma studies.

These essays take into consideration the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with film or literature. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan’s symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the associations between effect and trauma, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques targeted at teaching difficult texts, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Melanie Klein, Roland Barthes, Didier Anzieu, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek.

Review

“That the knot which links literature and film to psychoanalysis is intimate and durable is the beautifully validated premise of this collection. Over the past century periodic attempts to sever this tie have been met with reintroduced, and often more vigorous, forms of attachment. In the face of today’s post-critical calls for a definitive severance, several essays assembled here demonstrate, in ways wily, robust and rigorous, why this knot cannot be unloosed.”
— Joan Copjec, Brown University

NOTE: The product only includes the ebook, Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film in PDF. No access codes are included.