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Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
This collection of essays aims to introduce undergraduate students to Freudian methods of interpretation and to show how these methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. This reader combines an explanatory introduction with examples of the literary criticism which has emerged from the conjunction between psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. It defines concepts and methods by tracing the role the story of Oedipus has played in the development of psychoanalytic theory and criticism; the essays themselves are divided into three section - drama, narrative and poetry - and aim to give students a wide perspective on current directions in psychoanalytic criticism.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
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May 30, 2025
Introduction: The textual unconscious (by Maud Ellmann)
"And Freudian literary criticism causes a peculiar form of irritation, differing from other symptoms of the condition Paul de Man described as the ‘resistance to theory’."
"In literary studies, for example, psychoanalytic criticism often disregards the textuality of texts, their verbal surface, in favour of the Freudian motifs supposedly encrypted in their depths."
"Only by attending to the rhetoric of texts, to the echoes and recesses of the words themselves, can we recognise the otherness of literature, its recalcitrance as well as its susceptibility to theorisation."
"Lacan, more recently, has reaffirmed that dreams and symptoms owe their form to the principles of figurative speech: the unconscious processes of condensation and displacement correspond respectively to metaphor and to metonymy, which the linguist Roman Jakobson identifies as the twin axes of language."
"If the unconscious operates according to the strategems of rhetoric, this means that psychoanalysis and literary criticism are united by a common object of investigation: the boundless creativity of tropes."
Introduction: The psychic theatre (by Maud Ellmann)
"Often overlooked, the literary form of Oedipus, rather than the myth per se, pervades Freud’s whole conception of the psyche."
"The dream, he says, is the hallucinatory fulfilment of a wish, in which desires are replaced by their embodiments: thoughts become deeds, fears become monsters."
"In the fort/da game, it is specifically the element of drama that alerts Freud to the presence of the death drive."
"In view of the primacy of language in psychoanalytic theory and technique, it is crucial that Oedipus the King, its founding text, should be a tragedy of words rather than a tragedy of deeds."
"It is when we think we penetrate the text’s disguises that we are usually most deluded and most ignorant, for what we see is nothing but our unknown selves."
Introduction: Freud’s Oedipus (by Maud Ellmann)
"In psychoanalysis, as Freud observes, the concept of sex ‘goes lower and also higher than its popular sense’."
"When Freud speaks of the infant’s incestuous desire for the mother he is referring to a welter of libidinous imaginings, unrestricted to the genitals and including the sadistic drives to devour or eviscerate the mother’s body..."
"Perhaps the most disturbing implication of the Oedipus complex is that love is never merely a relationship between two people, but always a contest between three, even if the third is present only as a psychic obstacle."
"René Girard, for instance, has redeployed it to examine the erotic triangles that dominate the European novel. Almost all these triangles involve two men competing for the favours of a woman; but Girard insists that the bond between the rivals is often more intense than the bond that draws them both to the beloved."
"Freud’s analysis of smut offers a chilling model of male discourse as a kind of verbal gang rape, founded on the degradation and exclusion of the woman, who is reduced to nothing but a violated apparition..."
Introduction: Lacan’s Oedipus (by Maud Ellmann)
"For Lacan, as for Lévi-Strauss, incest is bad grammar."
"Lacan argues that every human infant enters its existence in this undifferentiated and miasmic state, which Freud described as ‘oceanic feeling’. To achieve subjectivity, the infant has to be conscripted into the lexicon of kinship..."
"The crucial moment of this separation occurs in the ‘mirror stage’... In contrast to this experience of fragmentation, the mirror offers a mirage of bodily coordination and control that the infant greets with jubilation."
"As Lacan writes, ‘the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself’, literally losing himself in his own reflection."
"For language originates in absence: the infant resorts to words only when the things it wants are unavailable. As Lacan writes, ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire’."
Introduction: Before the phallus (by Maud Ellmann)
"Juliet Mitchell, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), defends the theory of castration because it means that gender is determined by fantasy rather than by fact."
"Elizabeth Grosz insists that the prestige accorded to the phallus in psychoanalysis derives from the privileges of the penis in reality."
"As opposed to Freud, who saw the murder of the father as the founding act of civilisation, Irigaray asserts that ‘the whole of our culture in the west depends upon the murder of the mother’."
"In her doctoral thesis, translated as ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Kristeva distinguishes two orders within language: the symbolic, dominated by the father, the phallus, and the law; and the semiotic, haunted by the vengeful traces of a lost pre-Oedipal maternal world."
"Abjection literally means ‘casting out’; for according to Kristeva, it is through this process of expulsion that the infant establishes the limits of its body, rejecting whatever is perceived as alien, unclean, or improper to the self."
Introduction: Towards the psychoanalysis of literature (by Maud Ellmann)
"Rather, text and reader each reveal the inadvertent intuitions of the other: and it is out of this exchange that psychoanalytic theory is evolving still, in spite of its practitioners’ attempts to petrify its dogma."
"Cynthia Chase, in ‘Oedipal Textuality’, shows how Freud’s discovery of the unconscious uncannily repeats the tragedy of Oedipus; for Freud confessed that he was ‘gripped’ by Oedipus because he recognised his own desires in the hero’s crimes."
"For Lacan, on the contrary, the hero must be dispossessed of home and kingdom and every other prop to his identity before he can confront his exile not only from the state but from himself. He must recognise that recognition is itself a narcissistic mirage."
"The poetry of the sublime, Bloom argues, represents a manic triumph over loss: ‘a terror uneasily allied with pleasurable sensations of augmented power, and even of narcissistic freedom, freedom in the shape of that wildness that Freud dubbed “the omnipotence of thought”, the greatest of all narcissistic illusions’."
"In Kristeva’s terms, the Holocaust could be described as the Thing in modern history, the loss that defeats signification, rendering language irrelevant at best, or barbarous at worst." (Ellmann summarizing Jacqueline Rose's chapter, wherein Rose applies Kristeva's concept).
Chapter 1: Prologue: The Psycho-Analytic Reading of Tragedy (by André Green)
"Is it not that the theatre is the best embodiment of that ‘other scene’, the unconscious?"
"Every theatrical work, like every work of art, is an enigma, but an enigma expressed in speech: articulated, spoken and heard, without any alien medium filling in its gaps. That is why the art of the theatre is the art of the malentendu, the misheard and the misunderstood."
"The spectator will naturally compare this with his experience of a similar encounter, where the same relation of conjunction and disjunction is set up, linking the object of the spectacle with the objects of the gaze that a different barrier, namely repression, places beyond his reach."
"The family, then, is the tragic space par excellence, no doubt because in the family the knots of love – and therefore of hate – are not only the earliest, but also the most important ones."
"Tragedy, then, is the representation of the phantasy myth of the Oedipus complex, which Freud identified as the constitutive complex of the subject."
Chapter 2: Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud’s Reading of Oedipus (by Cynthia Chase)
"The complex Freud shares with Oedipus is, first, the drive to discover an Oedipus complex."
"The ‘Oedipus complex’ takes its explanatory power not simply from the generality of incestuous desire, but from the rigorous representation, in the Oedipal drama, of the temporal logic of repression."
"The sex of the cause is produced only through the text of the effect. The ‘cause’ – the parrincestual experience that has supreme guilt as its ‘effect’ – is, practically, the effect of its effect."
"In Sophocles’ tragedy, then, as Sandor Goodhart writes, ‘it is the status of the explanation that identifies those crimes that comes to be questioned …. Sophocles has shifted his interest from the myth to its appropriation, and it is this appropriation, in its origin and danger, that is examined.’"
"The parental gesture at once marks a special spot in the infant’s body and generates his name, Oidi-pous. The mark and the name in fact determine Oedipus’s relation to the Symbolic order and regulate his destiny."
Chapter 3: Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis (by Shoshana Felman)
"If Oedipus is, for Freud, the story of the meaning of the subject (of the subject's tragic subjection to a law of meaning), Oedipus is, for Lacan, the story of the meaning of the Other (of the Other's constitutive power of illusion, which articulates the subject's very destiny as a fiction, a narrative, a myth)."
"Psychoanalysis is not simply the theory of the Oedipus complex, it is itself, in its own textual functioning, an Oedipal drama: a drama of the quest for meaning, and of the crucial, critical implication of the seeker in the sought."
"Lacan's reading consists, precisely, in pointing out the dimension of the letter which Freud neglects; in focusing not so much on the meaning of the message as on the materiality of the signifier; not so much on what the letter says as on what it does..."
"The story of Oedipus, then, is not just the story of a crisis of vision (of a blinding truth, of an insight); it is also, and perhaps more importantly, the story of a crisis of address (of a crucial uncertainty as to who is speaking, and to whom; of a crucial ambiguity in the position of the addressee)."
"The insight of psychoanalysis, in other words, is the paradoxical insight into the constitutively misleading nature of insight itself."
Chapter 4: Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire (by Slavoj Žižek)
"It is, however, precisely this ‘infallibility’ and ‘omniscience’ of the detective that constitutes the stumbling block of the standard deprecatory theories of the detective novel: their aggressive dismissal of the detective’s power betrays a perplexity, a fundamental incapacity to explain how it works and why it appears so ‘convincing’ to the reader in spite of its indisputable ‘improbability.’"
"The key to the ‘art of detection’ consists not in a direct observation of facts but in discerning how the Real of the desire inscribed itself, in a distorted-displaced way, in the symbolic texture of the narration of the crime."
"The ‘subject supposed to know’ (the detective, the analyst) is thus in a way an impostor, but his imposture is structural, it is the necessary support of the symbolic order itself."
"The whole point of the detective’s final, long and boring explanation is not to let us know something new but to reassure us that he (the Law, the big Other) knows everything from the very beginning, that his knowledge is complete."
"Desire, in its fundamental dimension, is thus always a desire of the Other, a desire for the Other’s desire, which means that it is always caught in the dialectic of recognition, of wanting to be recognized by the Other."
Chapter 5: The Melancholy Persuasion (by Anita Sokolsky)
"Freudian theory sees melancholy as an attempt to deny an acute sense of privation by introjecting the lost object and deflecting attention to a series of inner dramas that covertly play out its loss. Such theory conceives of melancholy less as an inconsolable mood or affect than as a strategy."
"Because these subterranean narratives are scarcely registered, the melancholic seems indolent, whereas in fact he or she is living on a hectic if inaccessible level."
"Drawing on Klein’s account, Julia Kristeva posits a primordial sense of loss that precedes individuation and the notion of a lost object. That primordial loss of the ‘thing’ spurs a radical suspicion of signifying, for to enter into the symbolic order one must at least trust that language can express a gap between oneself and another."
"A fantasy based on fantasies defined by their unrepresentability, their narrative entrenchment, their suspicion of signifying, literary melancholy strains the limits of narrative credibility, emerging not simply in a character’s depressive affect, but also in more fleeting and stylized forms of narrative disaffection."
"For a writer disposed to indulge the gratification of fantasy, Jane Austen systematically deprives a reader of such gratification throughout the first half of Persuasion. The novel substitutes instead a series of exquisite mortifications for its heroine, Anne Elliot..."
Chapter 6: To the Lighthouse (by Daniel Ferrer) The full text for Daniel Ferrer's chapter, "To the Lighthouse," does not appear to be included in the provided document beyond its title and endnotes . Therefore, I cannot extract pertinent quotes from this chapter.
Chapter 7: Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity (by Harold Bloom)
"Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. These relationships depend upon a critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another..."
"The Sublime, as I read Freud, is one of his major repressed concerns, and this literary repression on his part is a clue to what I take to be a gap in his theory of repression."
"Uncanniness is traced back to the narcissistic belief in ‘omnipotence of thought,’ which in aesthetic terms is necessarily the High Romantic faith in the power of the mind over the universe of the senses and of death."
"Freud joins himself to the tradition of the Sublime, that is, of the strongest Western poetry, by showing us that negation allows poetry to free itself from the aphasias and hysterias of repression, without however freeing the poets themselves from the unhappier human consequences of repression."
"By showing us that anxiety is a mode of expectation, closely resembling desire, Freud allows us to understand why poetry, which loves love, also seems to love anxiety."
Chapter 8: Gérard de Nerval, The Disinherited Poet (by Julia Kristeva) The text for Julia Kristeva's essay on Gérard de Nerval does not appear to be included in the provided document. The document transitions from the endnotes of Harold Bloom's chapter to the beginning of Jacqueline Rose's chapter . Therefore, I cannot extract pertinent quotes from this chapter.
Chapter 9: ‘Daddy’ (by Jacqueline Rose)
"For a writer who has so consistently produced outrage in her critics, nothing has produced the outrage generated by Sylvia Plath’s allusions to the Holocaust in her poetry, and nothing the outrage occasioned by ‘Daddy’..."
"Turn the opening proposition of this quotation around, therefore, and we can read in it, not that ‘Auschwitz bequeathed the most arresting of all possible metaphors for extremity’, but that in relation to literary representation – or at least this conception of it – Auschwitz is the place where metaphor is arrested, where metaphor is brought to a halt."
"Take metaphor out of language and there is no memory, no history, left."
"For metaphor is the recognition and suspension of aggression (the second as the condition of the first), allowing the subject to take up any one of these propositions in turn: I want X but I do not intend to do it I want X but I am not doing it I do X (in fantasy) but I do not (actually) do it I want X but I do not want to want it – all mutations of an unspeakable desire..."
"My present theme seems to be the awareness of a complicated guilt system whereby Germans in a Jewish and Catholic community are made to feel, in scapegoat fashion, the pain, psychically, the Jews are made to feel in Germany by the Germans without religion." (Sylvia Plath, from unedited journals, quoted by Rose )
"And Freudian literary criticism causes a peculiar form of irritation, differing from other symptoms of the condition Paul de Man described as the ‘resistance to theory’."
"In literary studies, for example, psychoanalytic criticism often disregards the textuality of texts, their verbal surface, in favour of the Freudian motifs supposedly encrypted in their depths."
"Only by attending to the rhetoric of texts, to the echoes and recesses of the words themselves, can we recognise the otherness of literature, its recalcitrance as well as its susceptibility to theorisation."
"Lacan, more recently, has reaffirmed that dreams and symptoms owe their form to the principles of figurative speech: the unconscious processes of condensation and displacement correspond respectively to metaphor and to metonymy, which the linguist Roman Jakobson identifies as the twin axes of language."
"If the unconscious operates according to the strategems of rhetoric, this means that psychoanalysis and literary criticism are united by a common object of investigation: the boundless creativity of tropes."
Introduction: The psychic theatre (by Maud Ellmann)
"Often overlooked, the literary form of Oedipus, rather than the myth per se, pervades Freud’s whole conception of the psyche."
"The dream, he says, is the hallucinatory fulfilment of a wish, in which desires are replaced by their embodiments: thoughts become deeds, fears become monsters."
"In the fort/da game, it is specifically the element of drama that alerts Freud to the presence of the death drive."
"In view of the primacy of language in psychoanalytic theory and technique, it is crucial that Oedipus the King, its founding text, should be a tragedy of words rather than a tragedy of deeds."
"It is when we think we penetrate the text’s disguises that we are usually most deluded and most ignorant, for what we see is nothing but our unknown selves."
Introduction: Freud’s Oedipus (by Maud Ellmann)
"In psychoanalysis, as Freud observes, the concept of sex ‘goes lower and also higher than its popular sense’."
"When Freud speaks of the infant’s incestuous desire for the mother he is referring to a welter of libidinous imaginings, unrestricted to the genitals and including the sadistic drives to devour or eviscerate the mother’s body..."
"Perhaps the most disturbing implication of the Oedipus complex is that love is never merely a relationship between two people, but always a contest between three, even if the third is present only as a psychic obstacle."
"René Girard, for instance, has redeployed it to examine the erotic triangles that dominate the European novel. Almost all these triangles involve two men competing for the favours of a woman; but Girard insists that the bond between the rivals is often more intense than the bond that draws them both to the beloved."
"Freud’s analysis of smut offers a chilling model of male discourse as a kind of verbal gang rape, founded on the degradation and exclusion of the woman, who is reduced to nothing but a violated apparition..."
Introduction: Lacan’s Oedipus (by Maud Ellmann)
"For Lacan, as for Lévi-Strauss, incest is bad grammar."
"Lacan argues that every human infant enters its existence in this undifferentiated and miasmic state, which Freud described as ‘oceanic feeling’. To achieve subjectivity, the infant has to be conscripted into the lexicon of kinship..."
"The crucial moment of this separation occurs in the ‘mirror stage’... In contrast to this experience of fragmentation, the mirror offers a mirage of bodily coordination and control that the infant greets with jubilation."
"As Lacan writes, ‘the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself’, literally losing himself in his own reflection."
"For language originates in absence: the infant resorts to words only when the things it wants are unavailable. As Lacan writes, ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire’."
Introduction: Before the phallus (by Maud Ellmann)
"Juliet Mitchell, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), defends the theory of castration because it means that gender is determined by fantasy rather than by fact."
"Elizabeth Grosz insists that the prestige accorded to the phallus in psychoanalysis derives from the privileges of the penis in reality."
"As opposed to Freud, who saw the murder of the father as the founding act of civilisation, Irigaray asserts that ‘the whole of our culture in the west depends upon the murder of the mother’."
"In her doctoral thesis, translated as ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Kristeva distinguishes two orders within language: the symbolic, dominated by the father, the phallus, and the law; and the semiotic, haunted by the vengeful traces of a lost pre-Oedipal maternal world."
"Abjection literally means ‘casting out’; for according to Kristeva, it is through this process of expulsion that the infant establishes the limits of its body, rejecting whatever is perceived as alien, unclean, or improper to the self."
Introduction: Towards the psychoanalysis of literature (by Maud Ellmann)
"Rather, text and reader each reveal the inadvertent intuitions of the other: and it is out of this exchange that psychoanalytic theory is evolving still, in spite of its practitioners’ attempts to petrify its dogma."
"Cynthia Chase, in ‘Oedipal Textuality’, shows how Freud’s discovery of the unconscious uncannily repeats the tragedy of Oedipus; for Freud confessed that he was ‘gripped’ by Oedipus because he recognised his own desires in the hero’s crimes."
"For Lacan, on the contrary, the hero must be dispossessed of home and kingdom and every other prop to his identity before he can confront his exile not only from the state but from himself. He must recognise that recognition is itself a narcissistic mirage."
"The poetry of the sublime, Bloom argues, represents a manic triumph over loss: ‘a terror uneasily allied with pleasurable sensations of augmented power, and even of narcissistic freedom, freedom in the shape of that wildness that Freud dubbed “the omnipotence of thought”, the greatest of all narcissistic illusions’."
"In Kristeva’s terms, the Holocaust could be described as the Thing in modern history, the loss that defeats signification, rendering language irrelevant at best, or barbarous at worst." (Ellmann summarizing Jacqueline Rose's chapter, wherein Rose applies Kristeva's concept).
Chapter 1: Prologue: The Psycho-Analytic Reading of Tragedy (by André Green)
"Is it not that the theatre is the best embodiment of that ‘other scene’, the unconscious?"
"Every theatrical work, like every work of art, is an enigma, but an enigma expressed in speech: articulated, spoken and heard, without any alien medium filling in its gaps. That is why the art of the theatre is the art of the malentendu, the misheard and the misunderstood."
"The spectator will naturally compare this with his experience of a similar encounter, where the same relation of conjunction and disjunction is set up, linking the object of the spectacle with the objects of the gaze that a different barrier, namely repression, places beyond his reach."
"The family, then, is the tragic space par excellence, no doubt because in the family the knots of love – and therefore of hate – are not only the earliest, but also the most important ones."
"Tragedy, then, is the representation of the phantasy myth of the Oedipus complex, which Freud identified as the constitutive complex of the subject."
Chapter 2: Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud’s Reading of Oedipus (by Cynthia Chase)
"The complex Freud shares with Oedipus is, first, the drive to discover an Oedipus complex."
"The ‘Oedipus complex’ takes its explanatory power not simply from the generality of incestuous desire, but from the rigorous representation, in the Oedipal drama, of the temporal logic of repression."
"The sex of the cause is produced only through the text of the effect. The ‘cause’ – the parrincestual experience that has supreme guilt as its ‘effect’ – is, practically, the effect of its effect."
"In Sophocles’ tragedy, then, as Sandor Goodhart writes, ‘it is the status of the explanation that identifies those crimes that comes to be questioned …. Sophocles has shifted his interest from the myth to its appropriation, and it is this appropriation, in its origin and danger, that is examined.’"
"The parental gesture at once marks a special spot in the infant’s body and generates his name, Oidi-pous. The mark and the name in fact determine Oedipus’s relation to the Symbolic order and regulate his destiny."
Chapter 3: Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis (by Shoshana Felman)
"If Oedipus is, for Freud, the story of the meaning of the subject (of the subject's tragic subjection to a law of meaning), Oedipus is, for Lacan, the story of the meaning of the Other (of the Other's constitutive power of illusion, which articulates the subject's very destiny as a fiction, a narrative, a myth)."
"Psychoanalysis is not simply the theory of the Oedipus complex, it is itself, in its own textual functioning, an Oedipal drama: a drama of the quest for meaning, and of the crucial, critical implication of the seeker in the sought."
"Lacan's reading consists, precisely, in pointing out the dimension of the letter which Freud neglects; in focusing not so much on the meaning of the message as on the materiality of the signifier; not so much on what the letter says as on what it does..."
"The story of Oedipus, then, is not just the story of a crisis of vision (of a blinding truth, of an insight); it is also, and perhaps more importantly, the story of a crisis of address (of a crucial uncertainty as to who is speaking, and to whom; of a crucial ambiguity in the position of the addressee)."
"The insight of psychoanalysis, in other words, is the paradoxical insight into the constitutively misleading nature of insight itself."
Chapter 4: Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire (by Slavoj Žižek)
"It is, however, precisely this ‘infallibility’ and ‘omniscience’ of the detective that constitutes the stumbling block of the standard deprecatory theories of the detective novel: their aggressive dismissal of the detective’s power betrays a perplexity, a fundamental incapacity to explain how it works and why it appears so ‘convincing’ to the reader in spite of its indisputable ‘improbability.’"
"The key to the ‘art of detection’ consists not in a direct observation of facts but in discerning how the Real of the desire inscribed itself, in a distorted-displaced way, in the symbolic texture of the narration of the crime."
"The ‘subject supposed to know’ (the detective, the analyst) is thus in a way an impostor, but his imposture is structural, it is the necessary support of the symbolic order itself."
"The whole point of the detective’s final, long and boring explanation is not to let us know something new but to reassure us that he (the Law, the big Other) knows everything from the very beginning, that his knowledge is complete."
"Desire, in its fundamental dimension, is thus always a desire of the Other, a desire for the Other’s desire, which means that it is always caught in the dialectic of recognition, of wanting to be recognized by the Other."
Chapter 5: The Melancholy Persuasion (by Anita Sokolsky)
"Freudian theory sees melancholy as an attempt to deny an acute sense of privation by introjecting the lost object and deflecting attention to a series of inner dramas that covertly play out its loss. Such theory conceives of melancholy less as an inconsolable mood or affect than as a strategy."
"Because these subterranean narratives are scarcely registered, the melancholic seems indolent, whereas in fact he or she is living on a hectic if inaccessible level."
"Drawing on Klein’s account, Julia Kristeva posits a primordial sense of loss that precedes individuation and the notion of a lost object. That primordial loss of the ‘thing’ spurs a radical suspicion of signifying, for to enter into the symbolic order one must at least trust that language can express a gap between oneself and another."
"A fantasy based on fantasies defined by their unrepresentability, their narrative entrenchment, their suspicion of signifying, literary melancholy strains the limits of narrative credibility, emerging not simply in a character’s depressive affect, but also in more fleeting and stylized forms of narrative disaffection."
"For a writer disposed to indulge the gratification of fantasy, Jane Austen systematically deprives a reader of such gratification throughout the first half of Persuasion. The novel substitutes instead a series of exquisite mortifications for its heroine, Anne Elliot..."
Chapter 6: To the Lighthouse (by Daniel Ferrer) The full text for Daniel Ferrer's chapter, "To the Lighthouse," does not appear to be included in the provided document beyond its title and endnotes . Therefore, I cannot extract pertinent quotes from this chapter.
Chapter 7: Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity (by Harold Bloom)
"Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. These relationships depend upon a critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another..."
"The Sublime, as I read Freud, is one of his major repressed concerns, and this literary repression on his part is a clue to what I take to be a gap in his theory of repression."
"Uncanniness is traced back to the narcissistic belief in ‘omnipotence of thought,’ which in aesthetic terms is necessarily the High Romantic faith in the power of the mind over the universe of the senses and of death."
"Freud joins himself to the tradition of the Sublime, that is, of the strongest Western poetry, by showing us that negation allows poetry to free itself from the aphasias and hysterias of repression, without however freeing the poets themselves from the unhappier human consequences of repression."
"By showing us that anxiety is a mode of expectation, closely resembling desire, Freud allows us to understand why poetry, which loves love, also seems to love anxiety."
Chapter 8: Gérard de Nerval, The Disinherited Poet (by Julia Kristeva) The text for Julia Kristeva's essay on Gérard de Nerval does not appear to be included in the provided document. The document transitions from the endnotes of Harold Bloom's chapter to the beginning of Jacqueline Rose's chapter . Therefore, I cannot extract pertinent quotes from this chapter.
Chapter 9: ‘Daddy’ (by Jacqueline Rose)
"For a writer who has so consistently produced outrage in her critics, nothing has produced the outrage generated by Sylvia Plath’s allusions to the Holocaust in her poetry, and nothing the outrage occasioned by ‘Daddy’..."
"Turn the opening proposition of this quotation around, therefore, and we can read in it, not that ‘Auschwitz bequeathed the most arresting of all possible metaphors for extremity’, but that in relation to literary representation – or at least this conception of it – Auschwitz is the place where metaphor is arrested, where metaphor is brought to a halt."
"Take metaphor out of language and there is no memory, no history, left."
"For metaphor is the recognition and suspension of aggression (the second as the condition of the first), allowing the subject to take up any one of these propositions in turn: I want X but I do not intend to do it I want X but I am not doing it I do X (in fantasy) but I do not (actually) do it I want X but I do not want to want it – all mutations of an unspeakable desire..."
"My present theme seems to be the awareness of a complicated guilt system whereby Germans in a Jewish and Catholic community are made to feel, in scapegoat fashion, the pain, psychically, the Jews are made to feel in Germany by the Germans without religion." (Sylvia Plath, from unedited journals, quoted by Rose )
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