Overview

This book creates new perspectives on the integral relationship of painting, writing and psychoanalysis in the disclosure of Naturalism. It offers historical and psychoanalytical perspectives on the debate over whether the Goncourt brothers or Zola founded Naturalism. The interplay between the personal and authorical identity offers a fertile return to the heart of Lacanian texts. Focusing on complex relations of gender, desire and eroticized representations of the male and female body, it argues for new theories of culture through a structured textual analysis of the French naturalist novels. By comparing a wide range of fields, it addresses the new and exciting work now being produced in the field of psychoanalysis and its relation to sexual difference, feminism, subjectivity and culture.

Full Product Details

9780820416427

Table of Contents

Reviews

Julie Molnar ingeniously uses Lacanian concepts of subjectivity and transference to analyse the discourse of gender, painting and writing from a clinical point of view. It is an impressive achievement, written with verve and style, in which artist and model become 'signifiers in the space of the canvas.' (Lucia Villela-Minnerly) Not only does Julie Molnar's book offer a major innovation in the study of Naturalism, it offers a 'new' interpretive tool for reading paintings and texts through the psychoanalytic eyes of Jacques Lacan's teachings, addressing issues such as how texts are creatively constructed, what it means to pay attention to unconscious desire at work in a text, what causes narrative transformations... This study is both brilliant and clear. (Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, University of Missouri-Columbia) Julie Molnar offers an important and provocative re-evaluation of women's psychic and social position in the studios and literary texts of nineteenth-century naturalism. She elaborates the texts and artistic practices of Naturalism as a productive site for the construction and renegotiation of the feminine subject in Zola's 'l'Oeuvre' and the Goncourts' 'Manette Salomon'. This work will be of great interest to critics involved with psychoanalysis, feminism and the politics of representation in nineteenth-century France. (Mary E. Wolf, New Mexico State University)

Author Information

The Author: Julie Molnar is an associate professor of French and coordinator of the Foreign Language Program at Columbus State Community College. She received her B.A. and M.A. in French literature from Miami University, and her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1988. She is a member of the Lacan Study Group of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Modern Language Association and ACTFL. Dr. Molnar was a recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award from The Ohio State University in 1981. Since completing her doctoral studies, she has been active in attending conferences and presenting papers on the topics of painting, literature, psychoanalysis, and pedagogy, nationally and in Europe.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available