Peter Brooks

Alex Woloch

Professor of English at Stanford University Alex Woloch

Features contributors, Judith Butler, Frederick Crews, Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Wollheim and other theorists from such fields as literature, philosophy, film, history, cultural studies, neuroscience, psychotherapy. Under discussion in all these articles is whether Freud is still relevant, specifically whether psychoanalysis is still a valid theory of mind, if its therapeutic applications have been rendered obsolete by drugs, how psychoanalysis still figures in debates about sexual identity despite its rejection by many feminists, and how Freud's work still contributes to cultural analysis. The editor's conclusion is that Freud is not only still relevant but the "presiding genius of our culture and the author of its symptomatic illnesses." Papers were delivered in a 1998 symposium at Yale, the locale from which Freud launched his original invasion of the US psyche nearly a century before. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

Whose Freud?

Does a novel focus on one life or many? Alex Woloch uses this simple question to develop a powerful new theory of the realist novel, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a crowded field of characters. His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory. Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le Père Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The "character-space," as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel's very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation. Woloch's discussion of character-space allows for a different history of the novel and a new definition of characterization itself. By making the implied person indispensable to our understanding of literary form, this book offers a forward-looking avenue for contemporary narrative theory.

Professor of English at Stanford University Alex Woloch

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