In 1977, Shoshana Felman opened up the question of how literature and psychoanalysis speak to each other's most intimate concerns with her landmark volume of Yale French Studies entitled Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading ("Otherwise"). That relationship, she proposed, needed to be reinvented and transformed into a real dialogue between two different bodies of language and two different modes of knowledge. Over the forty years that have elapsed since the publication of Felman's 1977 volume, the encounter between literature and psychoanalysis has participated in the emergence of several new fields of critical inquiry, such as trauma, testimony, affect theory, neuro-psychoanalysis, and performance studies, and has been a privileged space for reflections on mourning, singularity, translation, transference, and translatability, the death drive, repetition, violence, cruelty, virtual reality, the clinic, and sexuality. In a world that has become enamored with modes of knowledge production that respond to ever increasing demands for quantifiable verification (the science of the brain) or for programmatic applicability, literature and psychoanalysis continue to offer an intractable resistance. Inspired (both directly and indirectly) by Felman's 1977 volume and working from the premise that this intractability is itself a source of potential transformation, the essays in this issue of Paragraph look to literature and psychoanalysis to invent new forms for the future.

The relationship between literature and psychoanalysis has never been one of equals. Traditional (particularly in American tradition), literature has been relegated to the position of foil for its more abstract counterpart—a mere body of language to be explained through the theoretical authority of psychoanalysis and, through its need to be interpreted, to add justification anjd pretige to Freudian theory. Such a relationship has always bothered literary critics—who feel that psychoanalysis refuses to even to recognize literature as such—and, of late, it has begun to both some scholars of psychoanalysis, as well. This volume proposes a fundamental reorientation of the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, arguing that neither discipline dominates the othr. Instead, the contributors assert that the subjects traverse each other's boundaries and that their relationship is one of give and take.

This collection of psychoanalytic readings of literary texts and literary readings of psychoanalytic texts has been carefully designed to work as an effective teaching text for introducing students to the complexities of psychoanalytic theory in practice. The texts selected are widely studied and map the development of the field from Freud up to the most contemporary work.

Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on the shifting paradigms in literary and cultural studies. Prompted by the changes and problems on the global scale, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in theories which are more embedded in the social realities and human condition. This volume shows that theory can reinvent theory and re-define criticism according to the demands of the new millennium. In this context, it examines new ways of considering the relation of post-theory to the concepts such as ethics, aesthetics, truth, value, authenticity, human, and reality to understand the mindset of the new century. This volume presents the various suggestions and concerns of post-theoretical studies that reflect the sensibilities of the contemporary social and cultural life. The book is a source of reference to develop an understanding of this change of attitude in post-theoretical studies towards a more directly and sincerely responsive approach to the current problems worldwide, their representations in literature and language, reflections in theory, roots in socio-political domains, and effects on the material reality.

The essays in this collection, first published in 1987, represent a collective attempt to listen with the third ear to the underhand ways the unspoken has of speaking, and to speak of these ways. By focusing on ‘discourse’ the volume is distinguished from traditional literature by its emphasis on rhetorical structures and textual strategies, and the investment of these structures with desire, power and other aspects of subjectivity, rather than the personality of the artist or the creative process. However, in this book the human dimension is not lost. By claiming that the structures in question are not merely linguistic, semiotic, or narratological (although they are all of these), the human dimension is returned- not ‘in the raw’, as in traditional approaches, but through the traces it leaves in the text, as activated by its reading. This book is ideal for students of literature and psychoanalytical theory.

Transcending the sex and gender dichotomy, rethinking sexual difference, transgenerational trauma, the decolonization of gender, non-Western identity politics, trans*/feminist debates, embodiment, and queer trans* psychoanalysis, these specially commissioned essays renew our understanding of conventionally held notions of sexual difference. Looking at the intersections between psychoanalysis, feminism, and transgender discourses, these essays think beyond the normative, bi-gender, Oedipal, and phallic premises of classical psychoanalysis while offering new perspectives on gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. From Freud to Lacan, Kristeva, and Laplanche, from misogyny to the #MeToo movement, this collection brings a timely corrective that historicizes our moment and opens up creative debate. Written for professionals, scholars, and students alike, this book will also appeal to psychoanalysts, psychologists, and anyone in the fields of literature, film and media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and social work who wishes to grapple with the theoretical challenges posed by gender, identity, sexual embodiment, and gender politics.

In a draft attached to a letter to his friend and confidante Wilhelm Fliess (May 31, 1897), Freud develops an idea: The mechanism of fiction is the same as that of hysterical fantasies. He supports this thought with a brief analysis of the biographical sources of Goethe's Werther. A few months later, on October 15, 1897, Freud mails Fliess a detailed account of remembered events from his childhood that, Freud believed, underlined the universality of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud's foray into literature initiated the beginning of a new critical approach. In Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, Emanuel Berman presents classic and contemporary papers written at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. In bringing these essays together Berman traces the development of a discipline that has often been plagued by a polarization between self-confident, single-minded psychoanalysts reading literature as a series of case studies and literary loyalists who cling to manifest content or to the declared intentions of the authors, accepting them at face value and depriving the work of its emotional complexity. Berman covers the full range of old and new perspectives, and presents selections from today's mature phase. This collection includes papers by Sigmund Freud, Steven Marcus, Patrick J. Mahoney, Donald Spence, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Ernst Kris, Phyllis Greenacre, Florence Bonime and Maryanne Eckardt, David Werman, Ellen Handler Spitz, Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Norman N. Holland, Roy Schafer, Meredith Anne Skura, Gail S. Reed, Francis Baudry, Rivka R. Eifermann, and Bennett Simon.