Secret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms―from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study―D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov―are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis―subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations.
Jennifer Spitzer (Literatures in English) publishes first book
By Jennifer Spitzer, January 13, 2023
Spitzer publishes Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis
Book image
Spitzer's book, Secret Sharers