2024 Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Â

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizeks work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Zizeks practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Zizekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Becketts Not I, and William Burroughss Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Zizek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek affirms Zizeks value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Zizekian criticism.
Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Zizek