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Dwelling in Language

Character, Psychoanalysis and Literary Consolations

by Margrét Gunnarsdottir Champion (Author)
©2013 Monographs 337 Pages

Summary

Since the heyday of narratology, character has been a contested theoretical field, moving uneasily between mimetic, structuralist and interdisciplinary paradigms. Built on Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjectivity, langugage and ethics, Dwelling in Language broaches new ground by exploring character’s ontological identity, its mode of being in literature. Through an alternative poetics, anchored in the Lacanian subject, the author’s readings of a variety of texts from medieval poetry to the contemporary novel aim at defamiliarizing the realist premise of previous investigations: character is shown to be a phenomenon of viscerality, narcissistically binding readers to the fiction, but at the same time subverting that bond by evoking the insentient materiality of signification.

Details

Pages
337
Publication Year
2013
ISBN (PDF)
9783653030617
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631644379
DOI
10.3726/978-3-653-03061-7
Language
English
Publication date
2013 (November)
Keywords
Literary Character Ethics Subjectivity Transhistoricity
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2013. 337 pp.

Biographical notes

Margrét Gunnarsdottir Champion (Author)

Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), where she teaches British literature and literary theory. Her current research focuses on English literature in the 1920s, the new French philosophy, psychoanalysis and gender, transculturalism, and the concept of medievalism.

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Title: Dwelling in Language