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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81479
Description
Title
Displacing Desires in Early Modern Drama
Author(s)
Walworth, Alan Marshall
Issue Date
1997
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Carol Thomas Neely
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, English
Language
eng
Abstract
"The introduction examines treatises on lovesickness to demonstrate affinities between Lacanian and early modern theories of a constitutively displaced desire, a perspective often overlooked by ostensibly more historicist approaches. The first chapter looks at the triangular jealous rivalries of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which an imaginary dynamic of imitative desire is caught up within a symbolic logic of sacrifice. The second chapter considers the parallels between the traditional ""theatrical ruse,"" which cures melancholic delusions by humoring them, and the psychoanalytic transference; both therapies are predicated on gendered dynamics of bodily loss and incorporation which also inform, at a displaced level, the convergence of healer and love object in the Jacobean drama's transferential cures for mad lovers. The third chapter argues that the cross-dressing women in the Hic Mulier pamphlet and Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl exemplify the Lacanian signifying operation of totalization and exception, of ""all"" and ""not-all,"" which at once establishes sexual difference and renders structurally impossible the sexual relation. The final chapter on Othello examines the play's obsessive desire to trace desire itself to its secret hiding place in terms of the impossible Lacanian real, ultimately suggesting that identity, no less than desire itself, is subject to a continual process of displacement."
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