TONIGHT! MARCH 27 FLEFF 2023: International Book Launch of Jennifer Spitzer's SECRET SHARERS: THE INTIMATE RIVALRIES OF MODERNISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS March 27

By Patricia Zimmermann, March 26, 2023

Jennifer Spitzer, Department of Literatures in English at Ithaca College, discusses her new book, Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis

"If modernism was anything, it was a literature of consciousness. For that reason, Freud and psychoanalysis have long been seen as crucial context to the literary innovations of the early twentieth century. Secret Sharers, however, troubles received notions about the role of Freud within literary modernism, offering a new narrative in which modernism was shaped by an engagement that was both anxious and constitutive. Jennifer Spitzer’s book is a timely invitation to reexamine modernism’s fundamental concerns and their bearing on the work we do as literary critics."

---Timothy Wientzen, author of Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex

Speakers

Welcome
Claire Gleitman, Dean, School of Humanities and Sciences

Salute to the Book :
Timothy Wientzen

Author
Jennifer Spitzer, author

Interviewer
Robert Volpicelli

For more information on this event, read more on the FLEFF website HERE.

This conversation takes place Monday March 27 on Zoom, from 7-8 p.m.

Sponsored by the Park Center for Independent Media and The Edge

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Spitzer is Associate Professor of English at Ithaca College. She writes and teaches at the intersection of transatlantic modernism, psychoanalysis, modern spiritualism, the medical humanities, and gender and sexuality. She previously taught at New York University, where she completed her Ph.D., and at Harvard University, as a Lecturer in History and Literature.

Her essays have been published in the Modern Language Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Modernism/modernity as well as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her book, “Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis,” was published in February 2023. She is a contributor to The Edge.

Read Jennifer Spitzer's latest piece for The Edge, "Purebloods: The Anti-Semitism and White Supremacy of the Anti-Vax Movement"

FLEFF: 26 YEARS OF A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT