You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the outset of Everything You Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), Slavoj Zizek (1992) suggests, apropos of this eclectic undertaking, that the difference between modernism and postmodernism lies in “the very status of
interpretation” (p. 1). Whereas modern criticism sought to explicate a pantheon of forbidding texts, Zizek claims, postmodernism turns to popular texts to reflect on theory itself. Generalizing though the distinction may be, with respect to psychoanalytic criticism such schematism is uncannily revealing: one need only consider the kind of analyses Zizek now inspires—that brand of nimble theorization that springs from any variety of pulp fictions—against the hard-boiled, prewar tradition of psychoanalytic exposition to grasp the interpretive divide. Is it possible, though, to combine these modes of psychoanalytic criticism?
In large part, this is the aim of Claire Kahane's Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman. Interrogating the emergence of literary modernism or, more precisely, the modern voice in literature, Kahane's book attempts to trace the birth of the subjective, fragmented, digressive narrative to which late 19th-century literature bore witness. This literary sea change was, of course, concurrent with the birth of psychoanalysis, and as Kahane argues, both events—or advents—concerned the “figure” of the hysteric. Insofar as hysteria remarks a disturbance of the symbolic order, of language, Kahane contends that it constituted a kind of insurrection against the status quo of Victorian society and, by extension, its literature. By taking this idea as a point of departure, each of the various analyses included in Passions of the Voice sets out to alloy literary and psychoanalytic determinations in what Kahane aptly calls a “psychopoetics of hysteria” (p. xiv).
Though a number of authors today are tinkering in a similar vein—the journal Lacanian Ink regularly features writers wh