Once Below a Time

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Once Below a Time
Dylan Thomas, Julia Kristeva, and Other Speaking Subjects

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Eynel Wardi - Author

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture

Price: $52.50
Hardcover - 254 pages

Release Date: May 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4559-3
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4559-4

Price: $31.95
Paperback - 254 pages

Release Date: May 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4560-7
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4560-0

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

Offers a psychoanalytically enhanced theory of poetics through close readings of Dylan Thomas and Julia Kristeva.

Highly original and theoretically wide-ranging, this book offers new insights into the origins of poetry. Working with much of the significant primary and secondary literature in psychoanalysis, particularly the theories of Julia Kristeva, the book skillfully sketches out a psychoanalytically enhanced theory of poetics through close readings of the works of Dylan Thomas. Through an intense dialogue with pivotal poems, it offers a "subjectivist" theory of poetic language, one that focuses on the interrelation between meaning and subjectivity in the dynamics of the poetic text. In this scheme, the "genesis of the speaking subject" is held to be a reenactment of old and new fantasies of origins, the reality of which is inaccessible to us--buried, as it were, "below time." Among these fantasies, the author also recognizes the psychoanalytic fantasy of origins that guides her own project.

"The basic premise of the book--that Kristevan poetics can shed light on Thomas' work and vice-versa--reveals unexpected ramifications of each. The theoretical issues posed are fundamental ones, and the readings of Thomas often satisfying and surprising. The work will be useful to people studying Thomas and to people trying to work through the implications of Kristeva's more recent work for literary study." -- Joshua Wilner, City College, CUNY

"I particularly like the way in which Wardi reads Kristeva in relation to other important psychoanalytic figures, such as Klein, Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan. Overall, I think that Wardi's affirmative reading of Kristeva, especially in relation to Klein, is both compelling and astute. In her close attention to the poetics of Kristeva, Wardi has not overlooked the most important aspect of Kristevian scholarship. I have not read many books which take Kristeva this seriously on this sophisticated a level." -- Linda Belau, Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University

Eynel Wardi is Lecturer and Teaching Fellow in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has studied with Julia Kristeva in Paris, and has previously published a Hebrew translation of The Europeans by Henry James.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. The Genesis of the Speaking Subject: Fantasies of Origins and their Realization in the Poetic Text

2. Poem on his Birthday

3. Incarnate Devil in the Garden of Eden

The Possibility of the Real
"Incarnate Devil"

4. Under the Sign of Loss, a Recuperation

The Double Determination of Repetition
The Princedom of the Apple Towns

5. The Lover, the Poet, and the Lunatic

Oedipus and the Problem of Boundaries
"A Prospect of the Sea"
"The Mouse and the Woman"

Conclusion: A Confession of the Speaking Subject (or Who Is Afraid of Dylan Thomas?)

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Related Subjects

Literary Criticism
Psychological Approaches to Literature
Poetry

36201/36202(JP/LDS/)

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