Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Hardcover

Schwenger, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804733430 ISBN 13: 9780804733434

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading. Also, drawing on artists' books, drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, the author illuminates the process of textual visualization.

About this title

Review

"This is one of a handful of books of criticism that has and wil continue to profoundly affect how I think about reading. Fantasm and Fiction makes a timely contribution to a trend in literarty criticism just coming into its own, takes a deserved place in the challenging and presitigious Cultural Memory in the Present series form Stanford, and provides stimulating and exemplary critical thought for all readers of literature."--Henry Street

Synopsis

Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms. Contemporary writers like John Gardner, Maurice Blanchot, and John Banville figure this possession as a kind of textual dreaming: fiction, like dream, draws from a fantasmal unconscious. For the reader s images to become conscious, however, they must be cued by a material text through framing strategies and evocative gaps. This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works such as Calvino s If on a Winter s Night a Traveller, Coleridge s Kubla Khan, Sorrentino s Mulligan Stew, and Rimbaud s The Vowels that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading.

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0804733430
• ISBN 13: 9780804733434
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 194