"Psychoanalysis is dead!" Again and again this obituary is pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. The Legend of Freud shows why psychoanalysis has remained uncanny, not just for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as well—and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text that must be read: deciphered, interpreted, rewritten. Psychoanalysis: legenda est. Review "The Legend of Freud is a fine example of what can be done with Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge, and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and Derrida, Weber doesn't so much explain or interpret Freud as engage him, performing what Freud would have called an Auseinandersetzung, a discussion or argument that's also a taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don't understand it; but this wouldn't be the case if there were more books like Weber's. The Legend of Freud is the best deconstructive work I've seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to what's right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative, respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new ideas." —Village Voice Literary Supplement

Ailing, neurotic, and bored with the world, the nobleman Des Esseintes retreats to a secluded cottage in the French countryside. Determined to shun all contact with other people—demanding that even his live-in domestics must wear face-covering robes in his presence—he throws himself into an all-out celebration of the ultimate in artificial and unnatural pleasure. Surrendering to religious and profane literature, morbid paintings, overwhelming perfumes, expensive liquor, grotesque flowers, and reminiscences of his depraved past brings him unsurpassable pleasure, but his mental and physical condition may not be able to keep up. When Huysmans wrote Against the Grain, he did so to move away from the creative restrictions he felt the Naturalist school of literature imposed on him. According to him, “it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.” Instead, he dedicated Naturalism’s attention to detail to just one extraordinary, perverse individual, Des Esseintes—fully expecting the resulting work to fail critically and commercially. That the novel would become a scandalous success, and would define Decadence as a movement and ideology, was far beyond his expectations. Oscar Wilde was a well-known admirer of the novel, and drew heavily from it to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. During his trial in 1895, Wilde all but confirmed that the “poisonous French novel” in his work refers to Against the Grain. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the first unabridged English edition, which was translated anonymously and published by Groves & Michaux in 1926. It reinstates passages that were considered too obscene in previous editions, and includes a preface Huysmans wrote twenty years after the first publication of the book.

This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others--namely, philosophy--but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the "text" and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the author holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or "deconstructive," criticism. Gasch argues that "the scenes of production" within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors' intentions, stage a work's own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation. In Gasch 's construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, he not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of "argumentation" that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it. The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautr amont, Nerval, de l'Isle Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville.

Andrea Goulet takes the study of the novel into the realm of the visual by situating it in the context of nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical discourse about the nature of sight. She argues that French realism, detective fiction, science fiction, and literature of the fantastic from 1830 to 1910 reflected competition between two modern visual modes: a not-yet-outdated idealism and an empiricism that located truth in the body. More specifically, the book argues that key narrative forms of the nineteenth century were shaped by a set of scientific debates: between idealism and materialism in Honoré Balzac's Comédie humaine, between deduction and induction in early French detective fiction, and between objective vision and subjective vision in the "optogram" fictions of Jules Verne and others. Goulet aims to revise critical views on the modern novel in a number of ways. For instance, although many literary studies focus on the impact of cinema, photography, and painting, Optiques asserts the materialist bases of realism by establishing a genealogy of popular fictional genres as fundamentally optical, that is, as articulated according to bodily notions of sight. With its chronological and interdisciplinary scope, Optiques stands to contribute an important chapter to the study of literary modernity in its scientific context.