Transgressions of Reading: Narrative Engagement as Exile and Return

by Robert D. Newman

Overview

It is often claimed that we know ourselves and the world through narratives. In this book, Robert D. Newman portrays narrative engagement as a process grounded in psychoanalytic theory to explain how readers (or listeners or viewers) manage to engage with specific narratives and derive from them a personal experience.
Newman describes this psychodrama of narrative engagement as that of exile and return, an experience in which narrative becomes a type of homeland, beckoning and elusive, endlessly defining and disrupting the borders of a reader's identity. Within this paradigm, he considers a fascinating variety of narrative texts: from the Jim Jones episode in Guyana to Freud's repression of personal history in his story of Moses; from a surrealistic collage novel by Max Ernst to the horror films of Alfred Hitchcock; from the works of James Joyce, Ariel Dorfman, Milan Kundera, and D. M. Thomas to the tales of abjection in pornography.
Transgressions of Reading is itself an engaging work, as interesting for its provocative readings of particular works as for its theoretical insights. It will appeal to readers from all fields in which narrative plays a crucial role, in the study of film and art, modern and contemporary literature, popular culture, and feminist, psychoanalytic, and reader response theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822312963
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/13/1992
Series:	Post-Contemporary Interventions
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)

About the Author

Robert D. Newman, Professor of English at Texas A&M University, is the coeditor of Joyce's Ulysses: The Larger Perspective and author of Understanding Thomas Pynchon.

Editorial Reviews

"Robert Newman's book offers an impressive range of postmodernist readings on aspects of culture work, from the collage, to horror film, to fictional narrative."—Hortense Spillers, Emory University


"This is one of the more engaging critical works I've picked up in some time. The material on Psycho was terrific, as was the section on Jim Jones, and the discussion of feminist criticism and pornography. The author is breaking new ground, reading unaccustomed but significant material in a shrewd and fresh way."—Mark Edmundson, University of Virginia


"This text has nearly everything one could want in a book of contemporary literary criticism. Newman's overall project is to argue that twentieth-century texts written or inspired by exiles produce in the reader's interpretive experience a similar state, an exile from the sort of narrative expectations that constitute a readerly ‘home' or site of gratification and interpretive security. He executes this task through a highly interesting list of modern texts"—Margot Norris, University of California, Irvine

From the Publisher