American Modernist Fiction - Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity

American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity addresses five American Modernist novels in light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: Nathanael West''s Miss Lonelyhearts, Kay Boyle''s Process, Djuna Barnes''s Nightwood, Thornton Wilder''s The Cabala, and F. Scott Fitzgerald''s Tender Is the Night. Dolis''s dynamic readings constitute a spirited "performance" of the narrative, deploying his own innovative form of literary analysis, what he calls "performance criticism". These psychoanalytic studies simultaneously stage the narrative and re-enact its putative significance, provoke and question its intent, thereby establishing a dialectics of desire—what both affects the body of the narrative and, equally, the critic''s subjectivity.