Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination--all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms. Contemporary writers like John Gardner, Maurice Blanchot, and John Banville figure this possession as a kind of textual dreaming: fiction, like dream, draws from a fantasmal...
Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination--all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious co...
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects--such as one's own body--situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects--literary and cultural attempts to control and...
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects--such as one's o...
At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping--from falling asleep and waking up, to drowsiness and insomnia, to states in which sleeping and waking mix. Delving into philosophy as well as literature, Peter Schwenger investigates the threshold between waking and sleeping as an important and productive state between the forced march of rational thought and the oblivion of unconsciousness.
While examining literary representations of the various states between waking and sleeping, At the...
At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping--fr...
At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping--from falling asleep and waking up, to drowsiness and insomnia, to states in which sleeping and waking mix. Delving into philosophy as well as literature, Peter Schwenger investigates the threshold between waking and sleeping as an important and productive state between the forced march of rational thought and the oblivion of unconsciousness.
While examining literary representations of the various states between waking and sleeping, At the...
At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping--fr...
Phallic Critiques, first published in 1984, is a study of 'masculine' styles of writing in the twentieth century - an age, according to Virginia Woolf, when 'virility has become self-conscious'. Writers who carry macho values to their extreme often subscribe to the popular feeling that writing is an effeminate activity for a real man to be engaged in. Consequently they attempt to forge 'masculine' style of writing in an effort to redeem language from its sexually suspect nature. These styles reveal much about the ambiguous and paradoxical attitudes of men towards their own masculine role....
Phallic Critiques, first published in 1984, is a study of 'masculine' styles of writing in the twentieth century - an age, according to Virginia Woolf...
