Author : Nathan Gorelick
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810146789
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)
Book Synopsis The Unwritten Enlightenment by : Nathan Gorelick
Download or read book The Unwritten Enlightenment written by Nathan Gorelick and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unveiling the fantasies that drove the Enlightenment and created modern literature Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.