American Modernist Fiction

American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity addresses five American Modernist novels in light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: Nathanael Wests Miss Lonelyhearts, Kay Boyles Process, Djuna Barness Nightwood, Thornton Wilders The Cabala, and F. Scott Fitzgeralds Tender Is the Night. Doliss dynamic readings constitute a spirited performance of the narrative, deploying his own innovative form of literary analysis, what he calls performance criticism. These psychoanalytic studies simultaneously stage the narrative and re-enact its putative significance, provoke and question its intent, thereby establishing a dialectics of desirewhat both affects the body of the narrative and, equally, the critics subjectivity.