Narrative mourning: Joyce, Freud, Kincaid, Derrida

This dissertation investigates the various configurations of the problematic of mourning in a selection of literary, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive texts. The authors on whom I concentrate are James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jacques Derrida. The introductory chapter examines the psychoanalytic contexture in which the question of mourning is initially posed and traces some of the important threads that make up the rhetorical fabric of the rest of the dissertation.; My first chapter on Joyce's Dubliners attempts to rethink the work of mourning, not as a reaction to loss (Freud), but as a correlate to the inception of desire. Such a perspective allows not only for a critique of Freud, but also for a more sympathetic approach to some characters in Dubliners (especially James Duffy and Gabriel Conroy) whose sensitivity to the mortality of the objects of their desires and to the necessity of extracting their substances from those objects in which they would otherwise be trapped have largely been interpreted as symptomatic of paralysis. By exploring the therapoetic purchases of the trope of prosopopoeia as to the fulfillment of the work of mourning, this chapter means to paint the broad strokes of a poetics of mourning.; Adopting a comparative approach, the second chapter lays bare the vicissitudes of melancholia in Freud and Joyce. The aim here is not to apply Freud's metapsychological papers to a selected number of Joyce's stories but rather to signal a familial air in the psychoanalytic and literary representations of the complex of mourning on the threshold of the Great War. The chapters that follow strive to articulate the poetic configurations of the melancholic affect and the ethical implications of narrative mourning.; Chapter three assesses the effect of the problematic of remembering and the history of slavery on the fictional work of Jamaica Kincaid. By exposing the uses and abuses of the cult of remembering, this chapter discerns the contours of repetition compulsion underneath the triumphant practice of remembering. The aim of this chapter is to account for the poetic (i.e., catachrestic) and affective (i.e., melancholic) components of the question of the representation of historical trauma.; The last chapter brings together the narratives of mourning of Kincaid and Derrida. The main purpose of this chapter is to assess the therapeutic virtues as well as the ethical limits of writing following the death of the other. By attempting to deconstruct the law of mourning and to ground it in an ever more perfectible theory of justice, the chapter explores the possibilities opened up by the affect of mourning in view of a theory of connectivity with lost others, the past, and history writ large.