Unspeakable secrets and the psychoanalysis of culture
By: Esther Rashkin.
Series: SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Albany, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780791475331
Subjects: Motion pictures -- Psychological aspects; Psychology and literature; European fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Secrecy in literature; Crypto-Jews
Description: "Esther Rashkin argues that psychoanalysis galvanizes, as no other discipline can, an understanding of texts in their social, historical, and political contexts. Demonstrating that close reading can be a radical political practice, she exposes heretofore unseen ideologies concealed in works of film and literature, from Last Tango in Paris to The Picture of Dorian Gray, from Barthes's Mythologies and Balzac's Sarrasine to Babette's Feast. Psychoanalytic concepts such as identification with the aggressor, the crypt, cryptonymy, illness of mourning, and the phantom allow Rashkin to reveal how shameful and unspeakable secrets propel the narratives she examines. In the process, she convincingly makes the case for a new practice of psychoanalytic cultural studies, a practice that fully engages with the politicized discourses - anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, censorship - that mark a text's location in history."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-252) and index.
Table of contents: title: Vexed encounters : psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and the politics of close reading; title: Devouring loss : a recipe for mourning in "Babette's feast"; title: Tortured history : crypts, colonialism, and collaboration in Last tango in Paris; title: Haunted children, cultural catastrophe, and phantom transmissions in the "Dirty War" and the Holocaust; title: Religious transvestism and the stigma of Jewish identity; title: Anticipating the final solution : symbolism and the occulted Jew in Villiers de l'isle-Adam's Axël; title: Imperial legacies and the art of abuse in The picture of Dorian Gray; title: The ghost of cultural studies.