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Final acts : traversing the fantasy in the modern memoir / Tom Ratekin.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ratekin, Tom.
- Series:
- SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture
- SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Literature, Modern--Psychological aspects.
- Literature, Modern.
- Autobiographical memory in literature.
- Terminally ill--Psychology.
- Terminally ill.
- Semiotics and literature.
- Authorship.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (179 p.)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Albany : State University of New York Press, c2009.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Writers facing death offer a rare glimpse into human mortality—they have the unusual opportunity to craft the closing chapter of their life stories. Final Acts explores memoirs of terminal illness, and shows a paradoxical pattern where the diagnosis of terminal illness evokes not despair, but a new freedom and richness in life. The memoirs analyzed—by Allon White, Harold Brodkey, Gillian Rose, and Derek Jarman—provide insight into the experience of radical contingency that an awareness of mortality brings. Tom Ratekin engages the concept of "traversing the fantasy," elaborated by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, to argue that the new richness in life each of these memoirists' experiences arises from the abandonment of a particular fantasy that guided his or her earlier work—a fantasy that both protected and inhibited the memoirist. Freed from convention, these writers, while close to death, can reinterpret the stories presented in their earlier work, and gain new perspectives on their worlds and existence.
- Contents:
- Finite and infinite games: terminal illness and the genre of the literary memoir
- The critical process of symptom to Sinthome: Allon White's "Too close to the bone"
- Working through the four discourses: Gillian Rose and the products of Love's work
- Harold Brodkey's traversal of fiction: This wild darkness as La passe
- Modern frame for the postmodern image: reclaiming the gaze in Derek Jarman's Modern nature and Blue
- The genre of the unconscious.
- Notes:
- Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9781438427409
- 1438427409
- 9781441621368
- 1441621369
- OCLC:
- 440817078
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