Cet article se propose d’interroger le discours psycho-corporel dans les publications du bien-etre (self-help) qui rencontrent aujourd’hui un vif succes, a travers l’analyse de l’ouvrage de Marie-Lise Labonte, Au cœur de notre corps. A la lumiere des observations de Philippe Hamon sur le roman realiste, nous avons tente de montrer que sa structure, tout autant que sa presentation du corps et de la maladie, epouse un ordre rhetorique herite du roman realiste. Sans etre un recit litteraire, ce recit de guerison quasi-miraculeuse partage des preoccupations voisines: nourri de langage reichien et de savoirs intuitifs sur le corps, le recit rejoint un principe organisateur emprunte au roman realiste — la logique du recit classique, son enchainement, sa dramatisation tiennent en echec le hasard. Le corps y apparait transparent, dechiffrable, authentique. Un nouvel imaginaire corporel populaire nait de ces dechiffrements: formate selon des lois rhetoriques precises, ce discours impose un corps idealise, fait rim...

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Au cœur de notre corps: Récit réaliste et imaginaire du corps dans le discours psycho-corporel français

Irmtraud Huber explores the association commonly made in the nineteenth century between poetry and opium, considering questions of form and content alongside references to the drug and imitation of its effects. The essay argues that Victorian poetry developed appreciative, though often deeply ambivalent, attitudes towards opium, in which the drug was not framed as the cause of poetry but its kin. With reference to the work of Alfred Tennyson as well as some less familiar poets (Francis Thompson, James Thomson and Robert Bulwer Lytton), Huber shows how the Victorians could conceive of poetry as a kind of opium and of opium as a kind of poetry.

“Grief’s Comforter, Joy’s Guardian, Good King Poppy!”: Opium and Victorian Poetry

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v014/14.1.brody.pdf

Freud, Racine, and the Epistemology of Tragedy

Making Legal History: Methodology in legal history

‘A Thousand Points of Light’ is a novel that tells the story of a wildlife photographer who begins his career making pornography in London. After a trip to Berlin, he moves to Ukraine, where he photographs young models for a website. Now living in Australia, Max is forced to return to Kiev and confront his past when a journalist, Nadya, arrives to interview him about the international award he is short-listed to receive.
The novel incorporates aspects of the 2008 Bill Henson affair and draws on the largely undocumented Ukrainian child model websites phenomenon. By locating the reader within the narrative as intimate witness, it exposes and exploits what the theoretical aspect of the thesis calls the Lacanian desire/drive of the transgressive. Additionally it explores the gulf between conventional morality and the artistic instinct which seeks to show beauty wherever it lies, asking to what degree the photographer is responsible for the scenes he or she captures.
‘Lacanian Psycho: analysing transgressive fiction’ is the exegetical component of this thesis. It applies the work of Jacques Lacan to the problem of transgressive literature by imagining the text of the novel as a Lacanian symbolic order, a pre-existing domain into which the subject/reader arrives and must resolve primary conflicts.
The exegesis locates the transgressive moment in the text as the last signifier in the metonymic chain proximate to ‘das Ding’, the unattainable/forbidden object of desire. The field of desire motivates both reader and writer, yet because ‘das Ding’ is also in the unknowable and terrifying order of the real, subjects are threatened. One response is repressive censorship; the alternative is the acquisition of new knowledge.
This model is applied to both the writing of the companion creative component, ‘A Thousand Points of Light’, and to the analysis of the following other novels: Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho, The Kindly Ones’ (Jonathan Littell) and ‘Platform’ (Michel Houellebecq).

/pdf/a-thousand-points-of-light-a-novel-with-accompanying-5a95jp8gad.pdf

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Au cœur de notre corps: Récit réaliste et imaginaire du corps dans le discours psycho-corporel français

“Grief’s Comforter, Joy’s Guardian, Good King Poppy!”: Opium and Victorian Poetry

Freud, Racine, and the Epistemology of Tragedy

Making Legal History: Methodology in legal history

A thousand points of light : a novel, with accompanying exegesis : 'Lacanian psycho : analysing transgressive fiction'