Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading

Abstract

This book explores some of the ways in which we think about reading and the effects reading has on us. Whether considered as a process, a representation, or a cultural activity, reading involves the idea about inner and outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of thoughts and feelings between one person or historical period and another. These ideas provide the basis for much of our thinking about subjectivity and receive their fullest elaboration in the twentieth-century discourse of psychoanalysis. Drawing on the rich tradition of British object relations, the book is a literary critics approach to the scene of reading understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. Linked chapters on books and interiority, memory and landscape, trauma and literary transmission provide an account of writing by Woolf, Austen, Rousseau, and Romantic women, as well as fictional accounts of slavery and colonialism, and Holocaust memoirs.

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