Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Largely discredited as an explanatory model or therapeutic modality, psychoanalysis lives on in literary hermeneutics. The text, which serves as a proxy for the speaking subject, can't, of course, talk back. No harm done, however—at least when French Freud belabors the obvious. Two examples chosen at random prove the point: 'sexuality functions as a rhetorical trope through which desire is represented' (emphasis added); and, from Montaigne's essay on paternal affection, 'emerges the representation of an exemplary bond of nurturance which functions as a reparative gesture in terms of the dynamics of the 'family romance'.' Less than obvious is the following pronouncement (which also seems against nature): Scève's 'dream of love [is] inextricably linked to a scenario whose principle [sic] motivator is the figure of the phallic mother.' Whatever its meaning, this sentence (along with the others just cited) proves that, sexual or not,
effective rhetoric may depend on a competent, even high-handed copy-editor." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)