American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity

By John Dolis

American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity addresses five American Modernist novels in light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Kay Boyle's Process, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Thornton Wilder's The Cabala, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Dolis's dynamic readings constitute a spirited "performance" of the narrative, deploying his own innovative form of literary analysis, what he calls "performance criticism". These psychoanalytic studies simultaneously stage the narrative and re-enact its putative significance, provoke and question its intent, thereby establishing a dialectics of desire--what both affects the body of the narrative and, equally, the critic's subjectivity.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1666935662
• ISBN13: 9781666935660
• Release Date: July 2023
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"