Lacan and Literature: Purloined Pretexts (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture)

This book of literary criticsm uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explicate Roland Barthes, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to uncover the relationship between literature, reading, and the unconscious, this book argues for a special affinity between a text and its reader. This process strives to unveil the disguises of tropic language in order to generate manifest meaning from latent content. Focusing on five twentieth-century writers: D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Roland Barthes, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, this book shows how Freud’s theories of condensation and displacement in dreams match Lacan’s uses of metaphor and metonymy in language. Despite the different backgrounds of these authors from America, England, and France, the unifying theme is that the unconscious (because it is structured like language) is the voice of the (m)Other disguised in figurative language.

Stoltzfus, Ben

History

State Univ of New York Pr

This book of literary criticsm uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explicate Roland Barthes, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

State University of New York Press

This book is a thematic approach to Robbe-Grillet's works. As a semiological and structural study of his fiction it addresses generative themes, serial permutations, the esthetics of revolt and revolution, the sexuality of the text, abyssal effects, dialectical topologies, labyrinths, and ludic structures.

Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text

UNKNO

Cat O Nine Tails consists of nine stories about cats and how cats have influenced certain characters. Although ostensibly about felines, the stories are also playful postmodern explorations of language, the creative process, images, sounds and cultural practices. The settings are international, and they range from California to New England, southern France, Istanbul and Cuba. The settings are as diverse as the stories. For example, Chapeau is a comic-erotic story about one woman who thinks she is the reincarnation of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet, and because chat, in French, is the word for cat, and peau is the word for skin, the woman has a predilection for hats, mirrors and her cat o'nine tails. The title of another story, Battery, denotes and conotes the Eveready flashlight battery (9 logo with a black cat), bodily harm, and army artillery. On its readerly level the story is about a boy who thinks cats really do have nine lives. Yet another story, The Sign, generates the sound O and the image of fire. Like Battery, it explores the innocent cruelty of boys toward cats--a cruelty that is mitigated by the linguistic weave and verbal play in which it is embedded. The Obelisk explores one boy's nascent eroticism that is caught between cultural expectations of conformity and foreign temptations. Beautifully written and exceedingly intricate, Cat O Nine Tails embraces the captivity of American literary fiction.

Cat O' Nine Tails

Neo Literati Press

A fourteen-year old American boy and his parents escape from the Nazi-occupied Balkans during World War II. They travel from Bulgaria through Turkey and the Middle East to America but danger pursues them on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic when their ship is attacked by a German submarine, and threatened by the battleship Tirpitz. With compelling prose Stoltzfus makes each character come vividly alive: Mirka, a Gypsy, the family maid who seduces the boy, Mireille, a precocious French girl who introduces him to Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir, his devout father, a pacifist, Archangel and Satan fighting over the boy's soul, which he thinks is going in one direction but, because soul is all around him, is going everywhere and nowhere. Although Transgression describes war and seduction, it is also a trip through international literature. Throughout, the wind, flowers, nightingales and symbolic colors in Oriental rugs foreshadow things to come. Hitler's rants, poetry and dreams appear as recurring tropes--images that are woven into the woof and weft of the writing process. They are the golden thread. Subtly honed with hallmark precision and keen insight, Transgression exemplifies the best in narrative art.

Transgression

Genre Fiction

Atmosphere Press

Review\nBen Stoltzfus’s Lacanian study of five stories and two novellas from late in Lawrence’s career demonstrates that contemporary critical theory can bring fresh illumination to a classic modernist. Stoltzfus’s readings of the seven fictions trace a progression from malady to remedy, an encouraging pattern for our troubled times. D. H. Lawrence – effectively reinforced by Lacan – emerges once again as a visionary writer with a compelling message of harmony and balance. 
-- Keith Cushman, University of North Carolina at Greensboro\nThis book gracefully connects the four subjects in its title: Lawrence, Lacan, the Anthropocene and the short story. The author’s clear exposition makes Lacanian theory accessible to the psychoanalytic novice. In his trenchant summary of twentieth-century intellectual history, Stoltzfus places Lawrence in a global historical context. Lawrence’s prophecy of our doomed world has come true; his cure is needed now more than ever. Stoltzfus sensitively responds to other critics’ readings, especially those of Lawrence’s detractors. He resurrects Lawrence from critical misreadings that may arise from projective identifications that negatively misconstrue the author’s intent. The Introduction could stand alone as a paean to literary modernism. With elegant simplicity Stoltzfus describes our current inability to concentrate, connect with others, or halt our destruction of the conditions needed to sustain life on the planet. Adroitly applying Lacanian theory, Stoltzfus performs close readings that are as apt as they are playful. Comparing Lawrence’s writing method to Hemingway’s and Camus’s unveils the secret of making a powerful short story. To read Stoltzfus is to remember why we loved Lawrence in the first place. 
-- Jill Franks, University of Massachusetts Amherst\nIn this exciting new book, the polymath Ben Stoltzfus amazes us yet again with his audaciously imaginative approach to literary arts, calling this book “an exploration of how literature thinks” (!) This “exploration” focuses on D. H. Lawrence’s “reinvention of the language of fiction.” Stoltzfus shows how, in these late stories, Lawrence joined conscious artifices like plot and character to linguistic figures (“gaps, puns, repetitions, metaphorical slippages, and homonyms”) charged by their impulsion from the unconscious. This linkage creates a climacteric space where “desire lurks” instead of remaining submerged, a la Hemingway’s “iceberg” theory of writing. While Lawrence rejected Freud’s unconscious (especially his incest taboo) and says he deduced his own version of the unconscious from “novels and poems,” Stoltzfus nonetheless finds a Laurentian affinity with Lacan’s own unique reading of Freud’s theories.\nStoltzfus’ scholarship is meticulous and never pedantic. His deep and abiding concern for the widest cultural/historical implications of literary works is joined with his unparalleled ability for exposition of some of the most complex psychoanalytic thinking. -- Juliet Flower MacCannell, University of California, Irvine\nD.H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective explores how literature thinks; more specifically, how the reading of fiction influences behavior. Lawrence writes passionately about our alienation from ourselves, from other people, and from the cosmos. He believes that we need to heed the voices of our unconscious, and he shows us how to meld body and mind so that, psychoanalytically speaking, Id and Ego can come together. In this endeavor there is a salient convergence between Lawrence's writings and those of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst. 
In this book, Stoltzfus examines the poetics of seven major fictions that Lawrence wrote between 1925 and 1930, five productive years that are referred to as his fabulation period. In each of the book's seven chapters, in tandem with Lacan's writings, Stoltzfus analyzes seven major characters, four of whom move from alienation to the renewal of

D.H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective

British & Irish

Lexington Books

Falling and Other Stories

A novella and six short fictions, is by turn mythic and realistic, movingand wistful, innovative and traditional. It maps a wide geography of human emotions: lust, adventure, love, alienation, explicit violence and implicit passion. Ben Stoltzfus makes each character--a glamour girl, a scuba queen, a shaman, a mountain climber, a skier, a ball-court superstar, women in distress, even strangers--come vividly alive. In "Falling" you, the narrator, climb toward the summit with Juan, your friend, following flashbacks in the narrative trail. In "The Bank," a father and son come to terms with a lifetime of estrangement. In "Glamour Girl," a woman reminisces about her husbands, rich people, Joe Louis and happy days in the spotlight. In "Scuba Queen," two college friends, now in their thirties, dive for abalone in the kelp beds of the Pacific Ocean where their rivalry begets a dangerous and miraculous denoument. "Masks and Bergamasks" is a love monologue, a silent conversation between a teacher and a student during a lecture on French Symbolist poetry. In "Samantha's Choice," three friends debate free will versus determinism, and are caught in an avalanche while skiing Mount Washington. In "The Games of Chichén Itzà," a shaman dreams Mayan life and ritual into a dramatic ball-court encounter between two teams; the play of the gods is re-enacted as struggle, blood-sacrifice and renewal. Subtly honed with hallmark precision and keen insight this wide-ranging collection exemplifies the best in narrative art.

Literary

Anaphora Literary Press

A novella and six short fictions, is by turn mythic and realistic, moving and wistful, innovative and traditional. It maps a wide geography of human emotions: lust, adventure, love, alienation, explicit violence and implicit passion. Ben Stoltzfus makes each character--a glamour girl, a scuba queen, a shaman, a mountain climber, a skier, a ball-court superstar, women in distress, even strangers--come vividly alive. In "Falling" you, the narrator, climb toward the summit with Juan, your friend, following flashbacks in the narrative trail. In "The Bank," a father and son come to terms with a lifetime of estrangement. In "Glamour Girl," a woman reminisces about her husbands, rich people, Joe Louis and happy days in the spotlight. In "Scuba Queen," two college friends, now in their thirties, dive for abalone in the kelp beds of the Pacific Ocean where their rivalry begets a dangerous and miraculous denoument. "Masks and Bergamasks" is a love monologue, a silent conversation between a teacher and a student during a lecture on French Symbolist poetry. In "Samantha's Choice," three friends debate free will versus determinism, and are caught in an avalanche while skiing Mount Washington. In "The Games of Chichén Itzà," a shaman dreams Mayan life and ritual into a dramatic ball-court encounter between two teams; the play of the gods is re-enacted as struggle, blood-sacrifice and renewal. Subtly honed with hallmark precision and keen insight this wide-ranging collection exemplifies the best in narrative art.

IN THE TEMPLE OF DREAMS - The Writer on the Screen: Proceedings of the 1996 Oxford University Robbe-Grillet Conference (Mixed French & English Edition - Exact Transcription of the Conference)

Arts & Photography

Christie, Ian

Brown, Royal S.

Smith, Roch C.

ROBBE-GRILLET, ALAIN

Ramsay, Raylene

Fragola, Anthony

Van Den Heuvel, Pierre

Photography & Video

Living Time Press

Dumpster, for God's Sake

Equal parts sociological lore and screwball comedy, Dumpster, for God’s Sake bends reality into fiction in a uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human.
"Profoundly dystopian and completely believable." −Dean MacCannell, author of The Tourist
Loviers City believes that cleanliness leads to Godliness. But order quickly descends into chaos when a sighting of the Virgin occurs. Soon, thousands arrive to visit the spot where She appeared. But the pilgrims leave their mark, discarding refuse and besmirching Loviers City’s All-America vision.
Suspense mounts as Rudy Squazza, the red-bearded ringleader of the homeless, and Jasmine, a rich teenager working on a high school project, fall in love. He is a dumpster diver and the victim of police brutality. She dresses in black leather, rides a red Ducati Supersport 750, and is known as the “Angel from Hell.” 
With compelling prose, canny insight, and artful empathy, Ben Stoltzfus brilliantly examines group behavior in a timely tale of collective zeal and righteous intent that explores a city’s urgent quest for soul.

Humor & Satire

39 West Press

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