From illiteracy to literature : psychoanalysis and reading / Anne-Marie Picard ; translated by Kristina Valendinova.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Picard, Anne-Marie, author.

Contributor:

Valendinova, Kristina, translator.

Standardized Title:

Lire délire. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Books and reading--Psychological aspects.

Books and reading.

Psychoanalysis and literature.

Physical Description:

x, 153 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017.

Summary:

From Illiteracy to Literature presents innovative material based on research with nonreading children and reexamines the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and literature through the lens of the psychical significance of reading: the forgotten adventure of our coming to reading. Anne-Marie Picard draws on two specific fields of interest: first the wish to understand the nature of literariness or the "literary effect", that is the pleasures (and frustrations) we derive from reading, and second, research on reading pathologies carried out at St Anne's Hospital, Paris. The author uses clinical observations of nonreading children to answer literary questions about the reading experience, using psychoanalytic theory as a conceptual framework. The notion that reading difficulties or phobias should be seen as symptoms in the psychoanalytic sense allows Picard to shed light on both clinical vignettes taken from children's case histories and reading scenes from literary texts. Children experiencing difficulties in learning to read highlight the imaginary stakes of the confrontation with the arbitrary nature of the letter and the "price to pay" for one's entrance into the Symbolic. Picard applies the lesson "taught" by these children to a series of key literary texts featuring, at their very core, this confrontation with the signifier, with the written code itself. This book argues that there is something in literature that drives us back, again and again, to the loss we have suffered as human beings, to what we had to undergo to become human: our subjection to the common place of language. Picard shows complex Lacanian concepts "at work" in the field of reading pathologies, emphasizing close reading and a clinical attention to the "letter" of the texts, far from the "psychobiographical" attempts at psychologizing literary authors. From Illiteracy to Literature presents a novel psychodynamic approach that will be of great interest to psychotherapists and language pathologists, appealing to literary scholars and those interested in the process of reading and "literariness." Book jacket.

Contents:

I Coming to reading 14

The Subject Avant La Lettre: A Little Believer 14

The book, between totem and taboo 14

The marvellous child 18

Bathing in the maternal 22

The Subject to the Letter 23

The mother as a stranger: who speaks? 23

From the mother's tongue to the language of the book: it speaks! 25

To whom? The psychical position of the reader-to-be 29

To Read or not to Be: The Nightmare of the Nonreaders 31

False theories and beliefs: how not to arrive at meaning 35

Maintaining the status quo, dealing with the impossible 39

Watizdiz? Preserving the unreadable 40

II The reading thing and the reading body 48

Reading as "acting out" 48

"Loudly and clearly": the Freudian Lesen 52

"Words ... revealed their meaning to me without my naming them" 54

Another voice: the book-thing 55

The reading eros 58

How reading feminizes 65

"The penumbra of symbolic effectiveness" 68

III Dé-lire - the poets' dream 76

DÉ-Lire 1: The Book, Being's Native Land 76

Proust's child reader 77

The ego, an effect of reading? 80

The letter, a piece of the body 83

DÉ-Lire 2: Deleting the Name of the Father 86

Splendid splendid splendid splendid 88

X: the first letter of a new alphabet 90

Writing: the body's labour against the precarity of the letter 94

DÉ-Lire 3: Writing to Dis-Read the Need for Separation 96

Father's voice in the words 97

The father's gaze in the letters of Gods name 98

The primordial letter on the father's body 99

OR: letters or let her be 101

Father's letters or the prohibited reading 102

Writing, a "magical incest" 103

DÉ-Lire 4: The Literary Adventure: An Impossible Matricide 109

Adventure, or the time beyond the mother 110

"My dreadful wealth" 114

The unthinkable inscription, or writing as killing 118

A mother has been killed ... in the name of the Symbolic 119

Literature, or the failure of père-version 122.

Notes:

Translated from the French.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781138796027

1138796026

9781138796034

1138796034

OCLC:

886492345