In contemporary academic literary studies, Lacan is often considered impenetrably obscure, due to the unavailability of his late works, insufficient articulation of his methodologies and sometimes stereotypical use of Lacanian concepts in literary theory. This study aims to integrate Lacan into contemporary literary study by engaging with a broad range of Lacanian theoretical concepts, often for the first time in English, and using them to analyse a range of key texts from different periods. Azari explores Lacan's theory of desire as well as his final theories of lituraterre, littoral, and the sinthome and interrogates a range of poststructuralist interpretive approaches. In the second part of the book, he outlines the variety of ways in which Lacanian theory can be applied to literary texts and offers detailed readings of texts by Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery. This ground-breaking study provides original insights into a number of the most influential intellectual discussions in relation to Lacan and will fill a recognised gap in understanding Lacan and his legacy for literary study and criticism.

The Heart of Man's Destiny is a new reading of Lacan's seventh seminar. Working from a new perspective it explores the relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the Reformation.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis and American Literature considers the psychoanalytic applications of three classic works of nineteenth-century literature, applying Lacanian concepts throughout. Moncayo imports the dynamisms and texture of three English and American stories with the aim of developing psychoanalytic theory, rather than simply confirming or applying previously adopted psychoanalytic concepts and theory. The author begins with The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe, assessing the differences between Derrida's and Lacan’s analysis of this famous story. The book then considers The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, using James’ text for an in-depth analysis of Lacan’s Seminar on the Logic of the Fantasy, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, considering "passage à l'acte", and the objet a as the Wind and Heart of the Signifier. The authors use Lacan’s later theories to cast a new interpretative light on the stories, much as Lacan himself did with the work of James Joyce. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and American Literature will be of interest to academics and scholars of literary studies, psychoanalytic and Lacanian studies, and Philosophy.

This book explores the phases of Jacques Lacan's career and examines the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis.

The French theorist Lacan has always been called a 'literary' theoretician. Here is, for the first time, a complete study of his literary analyses and examples, with an account of the importance of literature in the building of his highly original system of thought. Rabate offers a systematic genealogy of Lacan's theory of literature, reconstructing a doctrine based upon Freudian insights, and revitalised through close readings of authors as diverse as Poe, Gide, Shakespeare, Plato, Claudel, Genet, Duras and Joyce. Not simply an essay about Lacan's influences or style, this book shows how the emergence of key terms like the 'letter' and the 'symptom' would not have been possible without innovative readings of literary texts.

Lacan in Public argues that Lacan’s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is, in fact, the central concern of Lacan’s entire body of work. Scholars typically cite Jacques Lacan as a thinker primarily concerned with issues of desire, affect, politics, and pleasure. And though Lacan explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric, rhetoricians have been hesitant to embrace the French thinker both because his writing is difficult and because Lacan’s conception of rhetoric runs counter to the American traditions of rhetoric in composition and communication studies. Lacan’s conception of rhetoric, Christian Lundberg argues in Lacan in Public, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies—that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the real-world circumstances it attempts to describe. As Lundberg shows, Lacan’s work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current rhetorical scholarship, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of rhetoric and agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion.