Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (ebook)

Argumento de Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (ebook)

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The "haunted" individual to whom the "encrypted" secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation. In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, "authorship," and the formation and origins of narrative.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.0Acknowledgments Note on Documentation Introduction: Character Analysis, Unspeakable Secrets, and the Formation of Narrative 3 Ch. 1 For a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Works of Abraham and Torok 13 Ch. 2 The Ghost of a Secret: Psychoanalytic Allegory in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer 49 Ch. 3 The Interred Sign: L'intersigne by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam 64 Ch. 4 Legacies of Gold: Honore de Balzac's Facino Cane 81 Ch. 5 In the Mind's I: The Jolly Corner of Henry James 93 Ch. 6 A Meeting of the Minds: Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher 123 Conclusion 156 Notes 167 Index 201