12 - Feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism

Summary

Excitement

In 1987 Janet Malcolm wrote an animated, enthusiastic review essay for the New Yorker on the recently published In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism: “The new writings – feminist, deconstructive and Lacanian, for the most part – have a wild playfulness and a sort of sexual sparkle that flicker through their academic patois and give them extraordinary verve . . . The New Critics of psychoanalysis worry Freud's text as if it were a metaphysical poem.”

Rather than a metaphysical poem, the essays address, of course, Freud's notorious handling and mishandling of an early case of female hysteria. But if (with a few brief exceptions) literature is absent from the volume, literary reading practice is not. Of the seventeen contributors, thirteen are academic literary critics. Although the presence of literary practitioners does not guarantee the literariness of the readings, the volume has enough essays that do worry over the workings of the texts – their power and their treachery – to give it the flavor of a serious encounter between Freud and the literary deconstructionists.