The constant call to admit guilt amounts almost to a tyranny of confession today. We demand tell-all tales in the public dramas of the courtroom, the talk shows, and in print, as well as in the more private spaces of the confessional and the psychoanalyst's office. Yet we are also deeply uneasy with the concept: how can we tell whether a confession is true? What if it has been coerced? In Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks juxtaposes cases from law and literature to explore the kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with...
The constant call to admit guilt amounts almost to a tyranny of confession today. We demand tell-all tales in the public dramas of the courtroom, the ...
This text argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the 1800s, the author looks at Balzac and Henry James, to show how these realist novelists created fiction using rhetoric and excess of melodrama.
This text argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the...
The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically. This notable volume--inspired by a symposium held at...
The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court...
One hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remains the most frequently cited author of our culture--and one of the most controversial. To some he is the presiding genius of modernity, to others the author of its symptomatic illnesses. The current position of psychoanalysis is very much at issue. Is it still valid as a theory of the mind? Have its therapeutic applications been rendered obsolete by drugs? Why does it still figure in debates about sexual identity, despite its rejection by many feminists? How does it contribute to cultural analysis?...
One hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remains the most frequently cited author of our culture--and on...
A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.
A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the...
Psychoanalysis and Narrative is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature can be articulated without reductive simplification. Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and narrative form are analogous, Brooks proposes that literature constitutes a fundamental part of human existence. He supplements the terminology of narrative theory with the rich and suggestive language of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis and Narrative is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature c...
"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a...
"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Ide...
