Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions

Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions Synopsis

In 1977 Shoshana Felman opened up the question of how literature and psychoanalysis speak to each other's most intimate concerns with her landmark volume of Yale French Studies, 'Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise.' That relationship, she proposed, called for a dialogue between two different bodies of language and two different modes of knowledge. In the forty years that have elapsed since Felman first articulated this relationship, alongside leading theorists and psychoanalysts of the time, the encounter between literature and psychoanalysis has participated in the emergence of a whole new range of fields of critical inquiry, such as trauma studies, testimony, affect theory, neuropsychoanalysis and performance studies, and has been a privileged space for reflection on some of its core concerns, such as mourning, singularity, translation and translatability, the death drive, virtual reality and clinical practice.

In a world that has become enamoured with increasing demands for quantifiable verification, literature and psychoanalysis continue to offer an intractable resistance. Inspired directly and indirectly by Felman's 1977 volume, and working from the premise that this intractability is itself a source of potential transformation, the articles in this issue of Paragraph by leading figures in the field look to literature and psychoanalysis to invent new forms of knowledge, or of unknowability.