Dwelling in Language

Dwelling in Language proposes a theory of literary character, based on Jacques Lacan's ideas about self, language and ethics. The book departs from previous studies in postulating an ontological identity for character. A variety of transhistorical readings aim at replacing the personhood of character with impersonal ethical zones.

Since the heyday of narratology, character has been a contested theoretical field, moving uneasily between mimetic, structuralist and interdisciplinary paradigms. Built on Jacques Lacan's ideas about subjectivity, langugage and ethics, Dwelling in Language broaches new ground by exploring character's ontological identity, its mode of being in literature. Through an alternative poetics, anchored in the Lacanian subject, the author's readings of a variety of texts from medieval poetry to the contemporary novel aim at defamiliarizing the realist premise of previous investigations: character is shown to be a phenomenon of viscerality, narcissistically binding readers to the fiction, but at the same time subverting that bond by evoking the insentient materiality of signification.

Autorentext

Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), where she teaches British literature and literary theory. Her current research focuses on English literature in the 1920s, the new French philosophy, psychoanalysis and gender, transculturalism, and the concept of medievalism.

Inhalt

Contents: The Ideality of Difference - Narcissus - The Mirror of Alienation - The Other's Desire - Transference - Character and Ethics - The Psychological Tradition in Old English Poetry - The Libidinal Machine in Graham Swift's Last Orders - Myths of Creation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Lacan and Bergson in Woolf's To the Lighthouse.