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- Author: Jeremy Tambling x
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This book joins together Shakespeare and Proust as the great writers of love to show that love is always anachronistic, and never more so when it is homosexual. Drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and Levinas and Deleuze, difficult but essential theorists of the subject of ‘being and time’ and ‘time and the other’, it examines why speculation on time has become so crucial within modernity. Through the related term ‘anachronism’, the book considers how discussion of time always turns into discussion of space, and how this, too, can never be quite defined. It speculates on chance and thinks of ways in which a quality of difference within time—heterogeneity, anachronicity—is essential to think of what is meant by ‘the other’. The book examines how contemporary theory considers the future and its relation to the past as that which is inescapable in the form of trauma. It considers what is meant by ‘the event’, that which is the theme of all post-Nietzschean theory and which breaks in two conceptions of time as chronological.
Not only did Sigmund Freud know literature intimately, and quote liberally from literatures of several languages, he has also inspired twentieth-century writers and philosophers, and created several schools of criticism, in literary and cultural studies. Freud was not just practising psychotherapy on his patients, helping them in difficult situations, but helping them by studying the unconscious as the basis of their problems. This book deals with Freud and psychoanalysis, and begins by analysing the 'Copernican revolution' which meant that psychoanalysis decentres the conscious mind, the ego. It shows how Freud illuminates literature, as Freud needs attention for what he says about literature. The book presents one of Freud's 'case-histories', where he discussed particular examples of analysis by examining obsessional neurosis, as distinct from hysteria. It analyses Freud on memory, in relation to consciousness, repression and the unconscious. Guilt was one of his central topics of his work, and the book explores it through several critical texts, 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', and 'The Ego and the Id'. The book discusses Melanie Klein, a follower of Freud, and object-relations theory, while also making a reference to Julia Kristeva. One of the main strands of thought of Jacques Lacan was the categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, as well as paranoia and madness, which are linked to literature here. The book finally returns to Freud on hysteria, and examines him on paranoia in Daniel Paul Schreber, and the psychosis of the 'Wolf Man'.
This chapter introduces the concept of anachronism, which means considering what is out of time and what resists chronology. It first takes a look at deliberate anachronism, a technique that can be found in Don Quixote, and then examines anachronism within the context of historical writing. The next section studies ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, where it explains that to work on any text of the past is anachronistic. The concepts of aphorism and contretemps are also discussed.
This chapter discusses the references to anachronism in the seven books of Proust's À la recherche dn temps perdu. It identifies the seven occurrences of anachronism in this work, and discusses each one in detail. The first use of anachronism shows the Renaissance world to support itself on anachronistic foundations, while the second places anachronism within life and prevents people from living one single chronology. The third occurrence of anachronism shows that everything has the power of return, the fourth suggests homosexuality, and the fifth implies an anachrony where facts and feelings split from one another. Finally, the last two occurrences are jealousy and matters of chronology.
This chapter takes a look at Proust's anachronisms in Michelangelo and Shakespeare's sonnets. It first studies Michelangelo's sonnets, which follow Proust's fourth instance of anachronism. It then looks at Shakespeare's preoccupation with time, which deals with a sense of crisis. It also looks at one of Shakespeare's characters, Falstaff, a figure who will not be contained.
This chapter examines two plays, King Lear and All's Well that Ends Well, in relation to García Márquez's Sonnet 106. It first looks at archival anachrony in Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and studies some of the novel's chapters. Finally, it identifies the characters who are anachronistic in King Lear and the chronicle of a foretold death in All's Well that Ends Well.
This chapter discusses post-Nietzschean philosophers and other forms of the anachronous. One of these forms is within memory, which is seen as always productive of the traumatic event. It studies the sense of catastrophe that is outside chronology. This chapter also studies anachronoristics, the structure of language anachronistic, the use of flashbacks in the film 2046, and trauma.
This chapter begins with three of Sigmund Freud's 'case-histories': Dora, diagnosed as hysterical; Schreber, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the Wolf Man (a case of infantile neurosis), in order to approach Jacques Lacan on paranoia and psychosis. Commenting on Dora, who was neurotic, and non-psychotic, Lacan says that psychosis requires 'disturbances of language', which makes it exceed paranoia. Freud makes Schreber an instance of paranoia, using for evidence, virtually, only the Memoirs, which he reads as a text. He examines his hypochondria, and feelings of being persecuted by certain people including Flechsig, the 'soul-murderer', and his delusional ideas, including believing that he had direct contact with God. The difference between Freud and Michel Foucault becomes key to reading modern literature. It seems that madness becomes not a danger for the writer but a condition that attends writing, as though writing had become madness, a marker of alienation.
This chapter engages with Jacques Lacan's influential 'return to Freud', and that requires engaging with some Freud Sigmund texts: The Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In 1934, Lacan joined the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), which was part of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Lacan's essay is fascinated by how the self formed in the mirror stage relates to the other. The 'symbolic order', a phrase from Lévi-Strauss, means language taken as a system, or structure of signs which the subject is brought into, under the authority of the father. Lacan discusses it in 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language'. Shoshana Felman emphasises that Lacan returns to Freud as to a master who knows that there is a blank in knowledge, which is the unconscious, and which Lacan images in the purloined letter.