The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious

Unveiling the fantasies that drove the Enlightenment and created modern literature

Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.
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The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious

Unveiling the fantasies that drove the Enlightenment and created modern literature

Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.
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The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious

The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious

by Nathan Gorelick
The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious

The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious

by Nathan Gorelick

Hardcover

$120.00 
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Overview


Unveiling the fantasies that drove the Enlightenment and created modern literature

Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780810146778
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publication date: 03/15/2024
Pages: 186
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

NATHAN GORELICK is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Barnard College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Literature, the Unconscious, the Enlightenment 
I. The New World Delusion: Robinson Crusoe and the Psychosis of Enlightenment
II. Pedagogy of the Repressed: Rousseau, Sade, and the End of Education
III. The Novel — Broken Sex Machine: Tristram Shandy and the Writing of the Impossible
Epilogue: Between Ideology and the Unconscious
Bibliography
Notes
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