Books by Jean-Michel (University of Pennsylvania) Rabate

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabate takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabate subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred action, fantasy, hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabate demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation.

Addresses anxieties about theory and claims that it still has a crucial role to play. This book sketches its genealogy, particularly its relation to surrealism, philosophy, and the hard sciences. It proposes that theory, like hysteria, consistently points out the inadequacies of official, serious and 'masterful' knowledge.

In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, first published in 2001, a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'. This concept, Jean-Michel Rabate argues, runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite, 'hospitality', a term Rabate understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to 'the other'. For Rabate both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde. Rabate examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce's engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabate explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.