Between the sign & the gaze

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A woman turns into a piece of furniture (Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest); a writer of children's books takes photos of naked little girls (Lewis Carroll); Mont Blanc becomes the maternal breast (Shelley); Hamlet mistakes Ophelia for a phallus (Lacan's Hamlet seminar); and mom turns out to have thermonuclear arms (Laurie Anderson's United States). Reviewing the ways in which women have been fantasized across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, Herman Rapaport offers a series of brilliant insights into the concept of the fantasm in modern art. This gathering of new and previously published essays centers on a key question in psychoanalytic theory - the primacy of visual (iconic) versus linguistic (auditory) realms in the construction of fantasy. Rapaport first provides a lucid analysis of the historical development of the French psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm - which includes such phenomena as dramas and daydreams, delusions, hallucinations, primal scenes, imaginary objects, fantasies, and complexes. In the chapters that follow, Rapaport considers both visual and linguistic aspects of the fantasm in penetrating interpretations of many well-known works, ranging from poetry to performance art. Engaging such controversies as the conflict between Lacanian and Derridean viewpoints, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in literary theory, feminist theory, and the intersections of psychoanalysis and philosophy in literary criticism.