Studies in Symbolist and Modern Literature

This course will place a selection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives in dialogue with several theories of fantasy and its relation to ideology. We will begin by examining the two models of fetishism that Slavoj Zizek draws upon in his formulation of the notion of “ideological fantasy”: the logic of fetishism as it is formulated in works by Freud and Octave Mannoni, and the structure of commodity fetishism as it is theorized by Marx.  We will be especially interested in asking how these two fetishisms account for a binding together of knowledge and non-knowledge. We will look as well at several alternative models of fantasy, especially Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten,” before we turn to a selection of literary texts that stage fantasies understood in a more traditional sense. These are, in shorthand, the anti-democratic fantasy of D‚Annunzio’s Le vergini delle rocce, the Orientalist fantasy of Flaubert’s Salammbô, the fantasies that link Satanism and same-sex desire in Huysmans’s Là-bas, the racializing fantasies of H. Rider Haggard’s She and Rachilde’s La jongleuse, the art of masochistic fantasy in Sacher Masoch’s Venus im Pelz, the fantasy that underlies the splitting character and portrait in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the parthenogenetic fantasy of F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste. To what extent are the theoretical models of “ideological fantasy” able to account for the ideological work performed by these narratives? To what extent may the Marxian and Freudian logics of fetishism themselves be said to share in identifiably “fin de siècle” fantasies? Requirements: one oral presentation; one 20-25 page seminar paper.

The following texts will be available in English at the campus bookstore. I recommend that you order original language versions through the internet, e.g. from alapage.com for French books, and internetbookshop.it for Italian ones.

Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love

Marx, Capital

Slavoj ›iñek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty

Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô

J. K. Huysmans, Là-bas

Rachilde, La jongleuse (The Juggler)

H. Rider Haggard, She

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

F. T. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist)

A reader containing selected critical essays, (including Mannoni’s “Je sais bien, mais quand même” and Laplanche and Pontalis‚ “Fantasy and the Originas of Sexuality”) will also be available at ICLP, as will the out of print English translation of D’Annunzio.