Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud (review)

Reviews365 or other aspect—such as Farrington and parodie repetition—of the dialogical discourse. As we might expect, the rhetoric of the later, "public" stories, is more concerned with social, artistic, and economic spheres than the assimilation of the ideas and languages of the earlier popular literature studies in the minds of the evolving protagonists in the early stories. Kershner's approach to Portrait is first an analysis of Stephen's assimilation of the discourses of school, church, and pop fiction, and his use of the "incremental repetition," which finally makes the popular discourses his own, in effect achieving a dialogism with the alien languages which surround him. The author here is especially impressive, with his detailed command of a vast assortment of the popular literature ofthe period. Particularly memorable are the parallels he draws to Tom Brown's S^oI Days, Eric, The Harrovians, Vice Versa, A Modern Daedalus, and, most importantly, The Count ofMonte Cristo. The author's Exiles chapter primarily explores the possibility of the play's echoing the popular literature of sexuality and marriage which found its way into Joyce's library. As with the earlier discussions, Kershner's detailed knowledge and thoughtful presentation of parallels and influences reflect not only painstaking research, but also an alert, creative use of the material. If the great traditional canonical writers, from Dante through Cervantes to Nabokov and Barth, commonly share anything with those who have only recendy been discovered , it is their pervasive use of the popular culture of their day. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature makes a major contribution to our understanding ofJoyce's early work, at the same time that it provides an intelligent model for the pop culture critical genre. University of MiamiZack Bowen Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth , Emerson, and SigmundFreud, by Mark Edmundson; xii & 171 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, $24.95. Mark Edmundson hopes to recuperate the Romantic virtues ofcreativity and originality from the contemporary oblivion to which Freud has consigned them. The recovery is sought in the name of the human possibilities stultified by Freud's therapies. The implication is that although there are indefinitely many possibilities for human action and conceptualization, Freud reduces their number by assigning originality and creativity to the unconscious. Thus Freud makes ofthem mere instruments rather than the ends in themselves that the Romantics 366Philosophy and Literature and Edmundson would have them be. The author allows that his negative evaluationoftheeffects ofFreud can be neither proved empirically norassigned a scientific status but can only be described, as though there were only scientific generalizations and personal avowals. But there is another way to make one's case: it consists in analyzing concepts, determining the status ofjudgments in which concepts appear, and laying bare die logic of the arguments in which judgments figure. There is just this sort of analysis in the book, but Edmundson's failure to cite it as one of the ways of making a case points to a weakness in an otherwise rich and rewarding work. The weakness lies in his descriptions and estimations of what it is that he is doing. For example, in the preface he distances himself from deconstruction on the grounds that his book is "more affirmative than it is demystifying" and makes "overt reference to the social context" (p. xi). The latter comes to no more than a reference to the fact that we live in a culture of psychoanalysis, while the former is questionable at best. The author claims to have discovered another Freud, a celebrant of freedom and self-creation, in addition to the familiar determinist. The discovery of this second Freud should loosen the hold on us of the first and enable us to unleash in ourselves the energies that he has convinced us are in thrall to the conserving powers of the censor. Since the affirmation of freedom and the other Romantic virtues is bought at the price of demystifying the (received versions of) Freud, it is hard to see how Edmundson has articulated a difference between himself and deconstruction. The reason it matters to him is that his reading of Freud is as persuasive as itis legislative ofour readingofTowards ReadingFreud. Edmundson is...