States of Fantasy is Jacqueline Rose's striking contribution to the current controversy over the limits of English Studies. Why has so little attention been paid to Israel/Palestine and South Africa, both of which have the strongest historical and political links to Britain as well as to each other? What can these two arenas of historic conflict tell us about the limits of the literary imagination? What new imaginary worlds are being built in the present at the very moment when the literary institution attempts to shed the false dreams of the past? In September 1993, Israel and the PLO first signed their first peace treaty; in April 1994, South Africa held its first non-racial elections. Jacqueline Rose uses the occasion of these epoch-making events to trace the place of the unconscious in our literary and historical lives. States of Fantasy persuasively argues that nowhere demonstrates more clearly than these two ongoing histories the importance of psychoanalysis to an understanding of public and private identities.
This book is intended for scholars and students of literature, comparative literature, particularly Middle Eastern and South African literature; anyone interested in controversies about literary studies, psychoanalysis, and culture; those interested in issues of nationalism and postcolonialism; New Literatures; contemporary politics/history; cultural politics; cultural studies.
- ISBN10 0198182805
- ISBN13 9780198182801
- Publish Date 21 March 1996
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 February 1999
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Oxford University Press
- Imprint Clarendon Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 198
- Language English