You know what I haven't posted in a very long time? An entry on the early scholarship of the now-famous. Usually I'm in search of theses about socialism (or conservatism) by a politician or jurist. Sometimes, though, I'm looking for the early work of a television star (like Megyn Kelley or Zahi Hawass). But this time it's going to be about an author of a popular press book whom it now seems everyone is talking about: Wednesday Martin. Her book Primates of Fifth Avenue seems to be everywhere. Check out this write-up, for instance, at the New York Post. That set me to wondering about her Ph.D. dissertation, written in Comparative Literature at Yale when she was going by "Wendy Martin." It is "Transference Occasions, 1880-1930: From Freud to the cultural field."
Cribbing now from her abstract:
This dissertation reexamines Freud's concept of "transference"--the dynamic of displacement, projection, and investment between analyst and patient--in relation to concurrent literary works and cultural developments. It suggests that in the historical period under consideration, a wide ranges of texts and discourses articulate a model of subjectivity which, like the one presumed by the early psychoanalytic concept of transference, is deeply relational. This "transferential self" is a self utterly contingent on--even indistinguishable from--others. It is also, I argue, a key and under-explored aspect of modernity, fueling the transition from literary realism to modernist style, and underpinning and linking arenas of early twentieth-century endeavor as various as cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Hollywood stardom.
First considering transference in the clinical setting through a reading of Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, I then turn to the roughly contemporaneous articulation of precisely those intersubjective dynamics and models of identity which menaced Freud in novellas by James and Conrad. A chapter on The Aspern Papers and Daisy Miller uncovers the centrality of relational configurations of subjectivity and the type of power which collocate around and emerge from them. Such a phenomenon may account for the pervasive "ambiguity" of James's plots and, in rendering literary realism untenable, contribute to his modernist prose style as well. Turning to Conrad, I emphasize the transferential dynamics which underlie and are constructed by narrative transmission strategies and intercultural encounter in Heart of Darkness. Such preoccupations with intercultural relational identity, as well as explicit allusions to Conrad, I argue, structure anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's Diary, and the emerging discipline of anthropology more generally. Finally, I consider the relational identities of star and fan in the rise of Marlene Dietrich to international superstardom. In considering transference as a concept authored within the modernist cultural field rather than merely an event in the clinical setting, this dissertation seeks to show how cultural shifts and literary texts inform one another, and to suggest a new perspective on modernist "ambiguity," "indeterminacy," and subjectivity.
Reading that abstract makes me think that Yale's Comparative Literature Department is a long, long way from Park Avenue, intellectually and culturally. But then again ....
H/t AGR.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.