Significant returns: Lacan, masculinity, and modernist traditions

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dc.contributor.advisorMorris, Wesley A.en_US
dc.creatorArmintor, Marshall Needlemanen_US
dc.date.accessioned2009-06-04T07:58:09Zen_US
dc.date.available2009-06-04T07:58:09Zen_US
dc.date.issued2002en_US
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation explores the grounding of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the intellectual and artistic movements of the modernist period, and reads masculine anxiety in the modernist novel in terms of Lacan's work on psychosis, masochism, and narcissism. The thrust of my dissertation is twofold. The first half aims at a reinterpretation of Jacques Lacan's work in light of his early intellectual engagements with Freud, G. G. de Clerambault, and Heidegger, and as such establishes the basis for Lacan's early work in the traditions of Freudian dream analysis, experimental French psychiatry, and existential phenomenology. The second half, starting with a discussion of Lacan's third seminar, The Psychoses, and D. P. Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, examines Henry James's enigmatic 1901 novella The Sacred Fount as a meditation on the uniquely masculine anxiety over negotiating same-sex intellectual relationships, manifested as psychosis. The subsequent chapters on Proust, Sacher-Masoch, and Joyce, read with the later Lacan of Seminars XX and available sections of XXIII, explore and flesh out possible Lacanian readings of masochism and narcissism with regard to paternal (or pseudo-paternal) relationships. The major theme of my dissertation is that of vexed intellectual relationships between men separated by generational difference. Situating Lacan's discourse in the context of the modernist period, I illustrate how Lacan's intellectual apprenticeships and encounters (real and imagined) play out in his mature work, beginning with the first seminars of the 1950s. With numerous polymathic allusions, jokes, and non sequiturs, Lacan attempts a "return" and a self-conscious rewriting of Freud from the perspective of a rank outsider, pre-emptively exiled from the Freudian school for having been born too late, in the wrong country, and medically trained outside of the psychoanalytic tradition. By the same token, texts such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Ulysses depict the psychic contortions of sidestepping Oedipal conflict through elaborate delusions and blunt disavowals of the father's potency. In sum, the trajectory of modernist intellectual life, especially psychoanalysis, turns on tendentious and broken relationships between teachers and students, as technical and artistic disciplines struggled to keep pace with cultural upheavals of the period.en_US
dc.format.extent222 p.en_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen_US
dc.identifier.callnoTHESIS ENGL. 2002 ARMINTORen_US
dc.identifier.citationArmintor, Marshall Needleman. "Significant returns: Lacan, masculinity, and modernist traditions." (2002) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/18059">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/18059</a>.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/18059en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.en_US
dc.subjectModern literatureen_US
dc.subjectGermanic literatureen_US
dc.subjectRomance literatureen_US
dc.subjectAmerican literatureen_US
dc.subjectEnglish literatureen_US
dc.titleSignificant returns: Lacan, masculinity, and modernist traditionsen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
dc.type.materialTexten_US
thesis.degree.departmentEnglishen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineHumanitiesen_US
thesis.degree.grantorRice Universityen_US
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophyen_US
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