Description
Notions of "internalization" play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. But the meaning of this term and the continuities and discontinuities at work in its varied deployment have, for the most part, gone unanalyzed.In Feeding on Infinity, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and often times object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, "patriarchal poetics."
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Explores the power and limits of the discourse surrounding internalization through close readings of Romantic texts by Wordsworth, De Quincey, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick. Situating the emergence of internalization as part of the history of what Gertrude Stein called "patriarchal poetics," and finding internalization frequently condensed into figures of eating and drinking, Wilner (English and comparative literature, City College and CUNY Graduate Center, New York) approaches these and other considerations with readings in the tradition of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and gender studies. Wilner states that "the notion of internalization tends to be handled...as a known quantity, whereas I am arguing that the notion itself remains obscure and thus that the problem of internalization and the problem of Romanticism may indeed, with respect to the discourse of literary history, be closely intertwined." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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