Gerald Doherty Boeken

Discussions of the self in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traditionally have a generic or a generalized quality: the self is modernist or postmodernist, essential or processive, unified or fragmented, etc. Pathologies of Desire takes a different tack: it shifts the ground of discussion, locating the self in relation to particular dispositions or traits of the subject, Stephen Dedalus. More specifically, it foregrounds three pathological states (autoerotic, paranoia, and the shame/guilt syndrome) as primary modes of self-aggregation - the unique power of painful inner splits and divisions to precipitate self-awareness, and to make the self self-reflexive. As challenges to self-understanding, anxiety (autoeroticism), persecution (paranoia), and humiliation (shame/guilt) are prime catalysts of those multi-layered linguistic resources that fortify Stephen's self with the means of comprehending its own angst. The fact that each particular self dissolves to make way for another underscores its purely contingent and transitional quality - it functions as a defense against the singularity of the pain that it generates. Stephen's ultimate prospect of creating new future selves is thus contingent on his power to liberate himself from the old ones' oppressive conditioning.

Oriental The Quest for the Secrets of Sex explores D.H. Lawrence’s engagement with Eastern systems of thought, especially Buddhism and Yoga, which were his main sources of interest. It tracks their impact on his thinking and their influence on his fiction. Lawrence looked to the East less for social, political, or cultural resolutions to the chronic problems that beset the West, but to engage with limit-situations – moments of radical transformation when the self sheds its social accoutrements and discovers dynamic new ways of being-in-the-world. He sought those new levels of awareness, new modes of desire, new ways of transmuting the self, and new soteriological goals that the West seemed unable to offer.

These nine «meditations» employ a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist critical methodologies by way of illuminating some of Lawrence's major Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover , and several short stories. The main approach is that is, these works are explored in terms of their rhetorical tropes (most often in terms of metaphor and metonymy). The meditations also draw significantly on narratology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Lawrence has not previously attracted such contemporary approaches.