Books by Ben Stoltzfus

D.H. Lawrence's Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective explores how literature thinks; more specifically, how the reading of fiction influences behavior. Lawrence writes passionately about our alienation from ourselves, from other people, and from the cosmos. He believes that we need to heed the voices of our unconscious, and he shows us how to meld body and mind so that, psychoanalytically speaking, Id and Ego can come together. In this endeavor there is a salient convergence between Lawrences writings and those of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst.In this book, Stoltzfus examines the poetics of seven major fictions that Lawrence wrote between 1925 and 1930, five productive years that are referred to as his fabulation period. In each of the books seven chapters, in tandem with Lacans writings, Stoltzfus analyzes seven major characters, four of whom move from alienation to the renewal of self and the cosmos. He argues that Lawrences fiction is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive by showing us how to circumvent dysfunction. Stoltzfus brings literature and psychoanalysis together in readings that are both aesthetic and epistemological. They are recipes for curing the Anthropocene.

Magritte¿s interarts dialogue with literature. The Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte (1898¿1967) is well known for his thought-provoking and witty images that challenge the observer¿s preconditioned perceptions of reality. `Magritte and Literature¿ examines some of the artist's major paintings whose titles were influenced by and related to works of literature. Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Poe's The Domain of Arnheim are representative examples of Magritte's interarts dialog with literary figures. Despite these convergences the titles subvert the images in his paintings. It is the two images together that express the aesthetics of Surrealism¿for example, the juxtaposition of unrelated objects whose purpose is to spark recognition. Magritte's challenge to representation compares with metafiction's challenge to classic realism, Les Chants de Maldoror for example, and the intersecting space between art and writing, sometimes referred to as the iconotext, manifests itself whenever Magritte borrows a literary title for a painting. His strategy is to paint visible thought, and this reverse ekphrasis, the opposite of a rhetorical description, undermines the written text. When he succeeds, the effect is poetry.