Description
Book SynopsisA comprehensive guide to the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and to developments in Kleinian theory. It offers an analysis and a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein's thought for understanding modernist literature and visual art.
Trade Review“
Cultures of the Death Drive offers a sustained consideration of Kleinian psychoanalysis for literary reading. It will doubtless open up psychoanalytic literary criticism to new and unsettling perspectives. I expect this book to have a singular and important effect on contemporary intellectual life.”—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
”
Cultures of the Death Drive is a work of great learning and original thought. I believe it will be an important source book on Klein for beginners and adepts alike.”—Fredric R. Jameson, Duke University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Abbreviations of the Works of Melanie Klein x
Introduction: Anxieties and Their Vicissitudes 1
Part One
1. Itineraries 23
2. Kleinian Metapsychology 55
3. Femininities: Melancholia, Masquerade, and the Paternal Superego 72
4. Masculinities: Anxiety, Sadism, and the Intricacies of Object-Love 94
5. Kleinian Melanacholia 118
6. The Death Drive and Aggression 137
7. The Setting (Up) of Phantasy 162
Part Two
8. Modernist Cultures of the Death Drive 193
9. Framing the Fetish: To the Lighthouse:
Ceci n'est pas un roman 218
10. Funereal Rites: Melancholia, Masquerade, and the Art of Biography in Lytton Strachey 273
11. Melancholia Reborn: Djuna Barnes's Styles of Grief 306
12. Melancholia, the New Negro, and the Fear of Modernity: Forms Sublime and Denigrated in Countee Cullen's Writings 343
Afterword: Modern(ist) Cultures of the Death Drive and the Melancholic Apparatus 386
Notes 395
Bibliography 451
Index 475
