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Hysteria has generated a vivid popular mythology as well as a vast scientific literature over its long history. In this spirited book, Martha Noel Evans sheds new light on the significance of hysteria both as an actual psychological disorder and as a cultural statement about gender. Drawing on medical and psychoanalytic texts from Charcot to Lacan and Irigaray, Evans traces the evolution of the concept of hysteria in France from the rise of modern psychiatry in the late nineteenth century to the present. Evans focuses her attention on the intertwining of politics, history, and culture. What she finds most striking is that, in spite of its constancy in the nomenclature of mental disorder, hysteria has persistently been defined as indefinable. She illuminates the processes of denial and projection at work in specialists' encounters with hysteria, showing how even in the discourse of modern science, hysteria itself has been transformed metaphorically into the tricky, oversexed, and elusive woman its sufferers had once been thought to be. Disputing claims that hysteria no longer exists as an illness, Evans links its recent resurgence in France to its function as a locus of repression of cultural anxieties. Fits and Starts will be rewarding reading for anyone concerned with the history of psychoanalysis and with the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, including scholars and students in the fields of women's studies, gender studies, cultural history, and literary theory.
This book unlocks the meaning of more than 5,000 idioms used in American English today.
The official journal of the American Association for the History of Nursing
Who has not, in a favored moment, ‘stolen the limelight’, whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display – its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness – are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.