Abstract
This section elaborates in two stages what I mean by ‘the American Unconscious’: first, by concentrating on the unconscious dimension with an explanation of my psychoanalytic methodology; and secondly, by specifying more historically the constitutive features of the American unconscious — what, that is, American culture has to repress in order to constitute itself as such. Having established the theoretical and historical groundwork, the second section then focuses on the manifest relation of Snyder’s poetry to the American unconscious so delineated.
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Notes
Jacques Lacan, ‘Intervention sur le transfert’, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) p. 216.
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See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trs. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject (1982), trs. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
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Jacques Lacan, Television trs. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, October 40 (Spring 1987) p. 9.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trs. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1977) p. 25.
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (San Francisco, Cal.: City Lights Books, 1947) p. 11.
Dominick LaCapra, ‘History and the Novel’, in his History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985) p. 128.
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Fredi Chiappelli, Michael J. B. Allen and Robert L. Benson (eds), First Images of.America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1976) esp. William C. Sturtevant, ‘First Visual Images of Native America’, pp. 417–50.
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Adrienne Rich, ‘The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet’ (1966), in her On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (London: Virago, 1980) p. 23.
See Peter de Bolla. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1973) p. 90.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘At Concord’; quoted by Elémire Zolla, The Writer and the Shaman: A Morphology of the American Indian (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) pp. 138–9.
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978).
Vine Deloria, Jr, Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) p. 2.
See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Jane Tompkins, ‘West of Everything’, South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 86, no. 4 (Autumn 1987) p. 377.
Richard Slotkin, ‘Myth and the Production of History’, in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds), Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p. 70.
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© 1991 Tim Dean
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Dean, T. (1991). The American Unconscious. In: Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376649_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376649_2
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