Bücher von John Dolis

This book addresses five American Modernist novels in light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Deploying his own innovative form of literary analysis, what he calls "performance criticism," Dolis (psycho)analyzes the narrative unconscious of each text to excavate a discourse "other" than the story being "told."

This book examines American literary texts whose portrayal of American identity involves the incorporation of a foreign body as the precondition for a comprehensive understanding of itself. This nexus of disconcerting textual dynamics arises precisely insofar as both citizen/subject and national identity depend upon a certain alterity, an other which constitutes the secondary term of a binary structure. American identity thus finds itself ironically con-fused and interwoven with another culture or another nation, double-crossed in the enactment of itself. Individual chapters are devoted to Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.