The desire to know the body is a powerful dynamic of storytelling in all its forms. Peter Brooks argues that modern narrative is intent on uncovering the body in order to expose a truth that must be written in the flesh. In a book that ranges widely through literature and painting, Brooks shows how the imagination strives to bring the body into language and to write stories on the body.

From Rousseau, Balzac, Mary Shelley, and Flaubert, to George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras, from Manet and Gauguin to Mapplethorpe, writers and artists have returned in fascination to the body, the inescapable other of the spirit. Brooks's deep understanding of psychoanalysis informs his demonstration of how the "epistemophilic urge"--the desire to know-guides fictional plots and our reading of them.

It is the sexual body that furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, eventually of language itself-which then takes us away from the body. Yet mind and language need to recover the body, as an other realm that is primary to their very definition. Brooks shows how and why the female body has become the field upon which the aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of a whole society are played out. And he suggests how writers and artists have found in the woman's body the dynamic principle of their storytelling, its motor force.

This major book entertains and teaches: Brooks presumes no special knowledge on the part of his readers. His account proceeds chronologically from Rousseau in the eighteenth century forward to contemporary artists and writers. Body Work gives us a set of analytical tools and ideas-primarily from psychoanalysis, narrative and film studies, and feminist theory-that enable us to read modern narrative afresh.

Reading modernist literature through the lenses of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Dead Fathers: The Logic of Transference in Modern Narrative examines the reproduction of passions and passionate conflicts—in individual behavior, in literary representations of such behavior, and in the critical responses to the literature.Through readings of four canonical modernist texts—Heart of Darkness, The Wings of the Dove, The Sun Also Rises, and A Room of One's Own—Nina Schwartz analyzes representations of rebellion against social forces. Arguing that modernist narratives frequently recuperate precisely those forms of authority they wish to undermine, Schwartz demonstrates that their representations of rebellion follow this pattern as well, promoting the very social forces they critique. This is an ever-widening circle, a pattern of repetition compulsion at the levels of character, textual authority, and literary criticism. The books tell stories of people locked into patterns they wish to escape, but the very depiction of entrapment reenacts the doublebind, as the oppressive forms of cultural authority are still the source of coherence in the text. The compulsion is further reproduced in the critical response to the books when readers repeat the structures, language, or concerns of the authors.It is this relation between reading and the desire for authority that Schwartz examines as an example of the psychological phenomenon of transference. Drawing on the work of Lacanian theorist Slavov Žižek to articulate a complex linkage of agency, authority, and desire in writing, this book examines how canonical modernist texts have functioned for readers as transferential objects, repositories of authoritative knowledge, and subjects that know and embody the truth of the modern.