Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan

by Jennifer Murray

Overview

It is unlikely that Jacques Lacan and Alice Munro were ever aware of each other's work. Yet, because of Munro's intuitive grasp of the complexities of human subjectivity and her ability to articulate subtleties and ambiguities, her fiction shares many of the insights of Lacan's theoretical advancements of the same period. They are both concerned with bringing the obscure undercurrents of the psyche to light. Jennifer Murray's Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan brings the works of the writer and the psychoanalyst into dialogue, offering innovative interpretations of a selection of Munro's stories. Approached from a Lacanian perspective, a close reading of Munro's texts reveals the libidinal energy at the heart of the stories and offers particular insight into aspects such as shame and humiliation - feelings that Munro presents with disconcerting acuity. Taking into account stories both of childhood and of adult experiences, Murray analyses the child's bewilderment as she confronts the incomprehensibility of parental injunctions and symbolic functions, while stories about women later in life speak of subjectivity in the field of relationships, where desire, and love are central concerns. Including extended reflections on fantasy, sublimation, persistence of purpose, transmission, love, and the roles of both paternal and maternal figures in Munro's work, Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan also reshapes literary debate on feminine subjectivity and sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773599857
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Murray is associate professor of North American literature at the University of Franche-Comté.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Preface ix

Introduction: The Black Room and the Opaque Place of Jouissance 3

I Early Encounters with the Other

"Royal Beatings": Fantasy, Desire, and Pickled Arseholes 15

"Princess Ida": Sublimation, Repression, and the Return of the Repressed 41

"Boys and Girls": The Assumption of Sexed Subjectivity 56

II Feverish Feminine Transport: Desire, Jouissance, and Love

"Eskimo": Fantasy and Beyond 77

"Too Much Happiness": Feminine Jouissance 98

"Tell Me Yes or No": The Love Letter 111

III Epilogue

The Truth of the Fixion 149

Notes 161

Works Cited 177

Index 187

Editorial Reviews

This is an intellectually exciting and stylistically elegant work. Its principal claim that the writings of Alice Munro and Jacques Lacan can be read together because they approach aspects of subjectivity, being, and desire in similar ways is persuasively defended and artfully demonstrated.” Naomi Morgenstern, University of Toronto


“… a valuable guide to forbidding territory, with strong readings of both familiar and neglected stories. Throughout, [Murray] attends carefully to other critics and notes Munro's obsessive themes and images, but a Lacanian skepticism remains, since, as Murray observes in the epilogue, “deciphering can take [one] so far, as far as language goes, but some of the truth remains inaccessible, inarticulably mired in the opacity of the real unconscious.”” CHOICE


“… il y a bien un véritable plaisir de lecture à entrer dans les analyses de Jennifer Murray. Une nouvelle étoile est apparue au firmament de la critique munrovienne, et dorénavant nos lectures devront tenir compte des siennes.” Cercles

From the Publisher