A study of psychoanalysis, the affectual body and modern literature

This research re-evaluates Freudian psychoanalysis, in relation to literature and modernity, in terms of the effectual body. Whereas, recent literary debates have situated psychoanalysis as a question of language, this project understands the unconscious as a question of affects. Arguing for hysteria as key to the history of modernity and literature, this project explores the clinical and literary hysteric as a double who figures as 1) a defensive mastery against the lived body, time and death and 2) a potential force of lived duration.