Jennifer Murray | University of Franche-Comte (original) (raw)

Books by Jennifer Murray

It is unlikely that Jacques Lacan and Alice Munro were ever aware of each other's work. Yet, beca... more It is unlikely that Jacques Lacan and Alice Munro were ever aware of each other's work. Yet, because of Munro's intuitive grasp of the complexities of human subjectivity and her ability to articulate subtleties and ambiguities, her fiction shares many of the insights of Lacan's theoretical advancements of the same period. They are both concerned with bringing the obscure undercurrents of the psyche to light.

Jennifer Murray's Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan brings the works of the writer and the psychoanalyst into dialogue, offering innovative interpretations of a selection of Munro's stories. Approached from a Lacanian perspective, a close reading of Munro's texts reveals the libidinal energy at the heart of the stories and offers particular insight into aspects such as shame and humiliation - feelings that Munro presents with disconcerting acuity. Taking into account stories both of childhood and of adult experiences, Murray analyses the child's bewilderment as she confronts the incomprehensibility of parental injunctions and symbolic functions, while stories about women later in life speak of subjectivity in the field of relationships, where desire, and love are central concerns.

Including extended reflections on fantasy, sublimation, persistence of purpose, transmission, love, and the roles of both paternal and maternal figures in Munro's work, Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan also reshapes literary debate on feminine subjectivity and sexuality.

208 Pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 9780773547810
November 2016
Formats: Cloth

Papers by Jennifer Murray

Espaces de vie de l'artiste: les enfermements à l'oeuvre, 2015

En 1978, Margaret Atwood publia un poème narratif intitulé «Marrying the Hangman» . Ce poème repr... more En 1978, Margaret Atwood publia un poème narratif intitulé «Marrying the Hangman» . Ce poème reprend l’histoire d’une québécoise du 18ème siècle, emprisonnée pour vol de vêtements, condamnée à la mort par pendaison et qui échappa à son sort en se mariant avec le prisonnier de la cellule voisine après l’avoir convaincu de se proposer au poste de bourreau. Elle réussit ainsi à réunir les conditions de leur double libération selon les lois en vigueur : lui, en acceptant de devenir le bourreau ; elle en acceptant de se marier avec le bourreau. Nous trouvons dans ce condensé d’histoire, nombreux éléments récurrents de l’écriture d’Atwood : l’enfermement, la thématique de la pendaison, la voix comme objet du désir, la question du rapport entre les sexes, le choix forcé.

Nous nous proposons, dans cette étude de quelques romans d’Atwood, d’examiner de plus près ce nexus de traces récurrentes qui se regroupent autour du motif de l’enfermement pour tenter de comprendre en quoi il fait signe : de quoi est-il l’indice, ou le symptôme? Plus encore, de nous demander ce que, au-delà du niveau de l’histoire, et son sens lisible, plus loin que le récit, et ses significations possibles, quel est le fantasme pulsionnel qui s’y inscrit ? Car dans les lectures qui cherchent une unité de sens, ou une multiplicité de significations (analogue aux niveaux du contenu manifeste et latent de l’interprétation des rêves), quelque chose est occulté, cela même qui donne l’impulsion affective au reste, qui permet de rendre compte de son impact– de la « fascination it exerts on generations of readers » pour citer Slavoj Žižek : c’est le niveau du fantasme, du désir inconscient «[which] concerns the domain of primitive sexual fantasies and desires » (Žižek, Plague 66) et qui s’inscrit dans la lettre du texte. Ainsi, nous verrons qu’au-delà des histoires de femmes emprisonnées et de la critique de l’oppression patriarcale qui constitue l’implicite de l’énonciation, il y a une autre direction de l’écriture, un aspect libidinal, une force qui lie le corps à l’inconscient sous le signe lacanien de la jouissance et qui permet de tenir compte de l’insistance du motif de l’enfermement dans l’œuvre d’Atwood.

Literature Interpretation Theory, Feb 13, 2015

This article proposes to analyse Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing (1972), from a Lacanian persp... more This article proposes to analyse Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing (1972), from a Lacanian perspective, as a myth of the origins of desire. Departing from dominant perspectives on the novel which situate its force in terms of the burning questions of the 1970’s, this reading of Atwood’s novel understands the unnamed narrator’s pervasive sense of guilt as an effect of having compromised on her desire. Emotionally deadened, the vital question which comes into focus for the protagonist is not whether or not she did the right thing but why she doesn’t feel anything; vaguely aware of something ‘missing’ in herself, she attempts to regain a lost ‘wholeness’. What she recovers, I will argue, is not some mythical missing ‘half,’ but the signifier of desire, the phallus, in the form of a fish. Indeed, throughout this quest narrative, the fish-signifier signposts the movement from self-betrayal to the return of ‘desirousness’.
Literature, Interpretation, Theory. LIT 26.1 (Hiver 2015) 1-21. Online 13 Feb. 2015.

Awarded the title of 'Best article' in the 2015 Margaret Atwood Society Awards.

Introduction to a collective volume of essays available at http://erea.revues.org/3940 Table o... more Introduction to a collective volume of essays available at http://erea.revues.org/3940

Table of contents:

Introduction: Jennifer MURRAY
Figures in the Lacanian Field: Reading Literature, Theatre and Cinema with the Later Lacan

I/ The Unspeakable

Maurice EBILEENI
Benjy’s Howl: From Symptom to Sinthome in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Julien ALLIOT
“I Know How that Sounds and I Do Not Mean that as an, but I Mean Christ”: The Disturbance in the Symbolic Order in Dennis Kelly’s Theatre

Kate KATAFIASZ
Dramatic Jouissance in Edward Bond’s Born

II/ The Fallible Father

Anne COMBARNOUS
The Uncannily Intimate in Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee: An Aesthetics of the Suddenly Obscene

Béatrice PIRE
Méprise, Errance et Métaphore Paternelle dans American Pastoral de Philip Roth

III/ Feminine Persistence

Jennifer MURRAY
“Not Entirely on His Side”: The Assumption of Sexed Subjectivity in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls”

Ellie RAGLAND
Knowing the Real in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone

IV/ Post-Symbolic Strategies

Erica D. GALIOTO
“One Long Frightening Climax”: Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Lacan’s The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Tamas NAGYPAL
The Postfeminist Masquerade and the Cynical Male Gaze: The Disavowal of Sexual Difference in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves

V/ Interview
Joan COPJEC
The Inheritance of Potentiality

“Not Entirely on His Side”: The Assumption of Sexed Subjectivity in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls... more “Not Entirely on His Side”: The Assumption of Sexed Subjectivity in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls”

http://erea.revues.org/4031

Abstract

The enigma of sexual difference is the nodal point of Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” (1968). The Lacanian concept of sexuation, which defines the positions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as belonging to discordant logical structures, will serve to illuminate the complex path of the unnamed female protagonist of this short story (and secondarily, of her younger brother) in coming to assume a position as a sexed subject. While the oedipal structure, including Lacan’s revision of Freud’s account, clarifies the initial identifications and idealizations which inform the process of sexuation, the story brings to light the inadequacy of this perspective to situate the speaking being as ‘sexed’. Through a metaphorical parallel with the fate of the farm horses, Mack and Flora, each of the children will encounter, incarnated in the figure of the father, the law of the symbolic order, or in other words, the necessity of symbolic castration; each will be called upon to assume a position on the side of man, or of woman.

E-rea, 2010

This article analyses Margaret Atwood’s 1977 short story collection, Dancing Girls, looking at th... more This article analyses Margaret Atwood’s 1977 short story collection, Dancing Girls, looking at the evolution of forms of anxiety in the different texts, shifting as they do from individual, or self-directed anxiety, to more community-minded, altruistic forms. The article offers a close reading of some of the individual stories, showing how they contribute to an overall logic related (primarily, but not solely) to male-female relations in the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of the promises of sexual and self liberation of the period, an underlying sense of emptiness, often experienced as impending danger, is perceptible and takes shape within Atwood’s stories as fantasies of violence or victimization, and appears in figures related to gothic imagery and doubleness.

Journal of the Short Story in English / Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle, 1998

Desire is by nature other-directed, it looks for an object which will reflect desire back to it, ... more Desire is by nature other-directed, it looks for an object which will reflect desire back to it, it wants the return of desire. Both Freudian and Lacanian theory have conceptualised the structure of desire in this respect. Freud's writing speaks of the libido1 which takes as its object either itself (ego-libido) or something other than itself (object-libido) (Metapsychology 94-95). Lacan's more poetic formulation, "desire is the desire of the Other," (264) brings out the doubly directed investment of the self in desire. Lacan goes as far as to say that:

for both partners in the relation, both the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be subjects of need, or objects of love, but... they must stand for the cause of desire. This truth [...] constitutes the condition of the happiness of the subject (287).

Love relationships are the most intense sites of desire-investment, an emotional situation where, in 'loving', the self gives up "a part of his [sic] narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his [sic] being loved" (Freud Metapsychology 93). Margaret Atwood's short story "The Grave of the Famous Poet" ("The Grave") from the collection Dancing Girls, locates its psychological tension in the moment which preceeds the breakdown of a love relationship. The exploration of the subject's process of detachment from its love-object, (the disinvestment of object libido) might be seen as one of the main aspects with which "The Grave" engages and our purpose here will be to examine the key textual moments in the life and death of desire as it informs and takes form in the story. Bound up in this investigation are three central concerns: the construction of gender identity and how it structures the breakdown of the relationship, the projection of the protagonist's psychic itinerary onto the outside world, and the way in which she negotiates the process of emotional disinvestment.

Canadian Literature, 2002

In its study of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, this article points out two ways in which myt... more In its study of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, this article points out two ways in which mythical intertexts intervene: as a form of open-ended play worked into the fabric of the text, highlighting associative possibilities; and as a framing structure which delimits and thereby limits in advance the range of possible meanings the text might offer. The investigation of these uses of intertext focuses on the myth of the Triple Goddess. Woven playfully into the construction of the characters in the novel, the Triple Goddess is also the anchoring structure of presence which precludes the possibility of any radical discontinuity in the novel’s discourses of meaning.

In a number of Margaret Atwood's works, sewing, knitting, and other forms of handcrafting activit... more In a number of Margaret Atwood's works, sewing, knitting, and other forms of handcrafting activities come to be associated with the representation of history, both as a concept and as a narrative account of the past. Alias Grace can be seen as a work of "historiographic metafiction" in which the quilting metaphor participates in the postmodern structures involved in representing a version of the past. Alias Grace points to the paradox that structures historiographic metafiction through the image of the quilt. Atwood interrogates the metaphorical possibilities of the patchwork quilt, which comes to represent the determining paradox of the novel and of historiographic metafiction: that of making present meaning from traces of the past. The handcrafting metaphor can be usefully considered in the context of some of Atwood's earlier works.

Études Anglaises, 2003

Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace tells the story of a woman who is sentenced to life in prison... more Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace tells the story of a woman who is sentenced to life in prison for murder. Basing her representation of the murder scene on numerous documented sources, Atwood’s strategy is to accommodate the different, often contradictory possibilities suggested by the sources, while at the same time, refusing to be entirely constrained by them. This produces a highly poetic rendering of the murder scene, which occurs twice in the novel. The shift in context that underscores this repetition contributes to the uncertainty effect of Atwood’s version of the murder, a version that resists definitive resolution.

The Journal of the Short Story in English, 2007

The Southern Literary Journal , 2010

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The task of criticism, then, i... more In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The task of criticism, then, is not to situate itself within the same space as the text, allowing it to speak or completing what it necessarily leaves unsaid. On the contrary, its function is to install itself in the very incompleteness of the work in order to theorise it—to explain the ideological necessity of those 'not-saids' which constitutes the very principle of its identity.

—Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology
To Kill a Mockingbird has become the object of a recent renewal of critical interest, starting with Claudia D. Johnson's To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (1994) and culminating in On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections (2007). Reading through this critical corpus, one is struck by two things: the recurrence of a need to justify having spent one's time on To Kill a Mockingbird in the first place (Johnson, Jolley, Hovet & Hovet, and to a lesser degree, Rowe) and the repetitive insistence on the themes of racism, sexism, and the 'coming of age' typology of the novel. Secondary themes, such as the focus on gothic elements by Johnson, the emphasis on vision by Champion, or the very coherent analysis of gift economy by John Carlos Rowe, seem to give the novel credit for greater discursive density, but one senses that the dynamics of the critical debate on the novel are already beginning to go around in circles. This gives some weight to the suspicion that To Kill a Mockingbird, despite its awards and popularity, is a less than great novel, without quelling the intuition that it is, at the same time, a novel worthy of critical consideration. My goal here will be to elucidate some of the characteristics of this not quite "splendid failure," but at least lopsided achievement. To do so, I will interrogate those aspects of the text that are radically open to interpretative debate, the knots and tangles in the work that seem to indicate points of unresolved tension symptomatic of artistic or ideological compromise. These fault-lines that disrupt the evenness of the writing are related to most aspects of the novel: its structural cohesion, the identification and status of a "main character," and its ideological positioning in terms of race, class, and gender. What is fascinating about these textual disturbances is that they do not necessarily give rise, in recent criticism, to a questioning of the presuppositions or pressures that produced them, but rather that they tend to fuel a process of disavowal: a refusal to see. In concrete terms, this is manifested by a critical propensity to fill in the disturbing blanks, to smooth over contradictions, or simply to misread the text.

Originating from a few short stories, To Kill a Mockingbird is first of all the product of marketing pressures. In the mid–1950s, Harper Lee showed the stories she had written about her childhood experiences to a literary agent who "suggested that she consider going a step further by weaving the stories into a novel … She attempted to do so in 1956 and a year later, she had completed the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird" ("Nelle"). The transformation of the stories into a novel was not immediately successful. Editors at Lippincott "criticized the novel's structure, which they felt read like a series of short stories strung together," but "saw promise in the book and encouraged Lee to rewrite it" (Chapman & Dear 270; qtd in Petry 160). Lee spent nearly three years modifying her work to meet the editors' requirements.

The first question this raises is: why was the transformation of short stories into a novel considered to be "a step further"; why couldn't the stories be published as short stories? Clearly the answer is that novels were more marketable than short story collections. In his biography of Alice Munro, Robert Thacker notes that in the 1950s and 1960s "it was a truism among publishers that [short story] collections did not sell, and that they should be attempted only once an author's reputation was already established through the prior publication of a novel" (142). Thacker refers to the despondency experienced by Munro in relation to pressures to produce a novel: "so much of the 'constant...

The Southern Quarterly , 2004

Article excerpt THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER gives us a day, a year, and a day in the lives of... more Article excerpt

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER gives us a day, a year, and a day in the lives of five distinct characters: Singer, Mick, Brannon, Blount, and Dr. Copeland. Their lives are shot through with frustration and discouragement and the intense privacy of their inner lives gives the reader the impression that they are isolated, lonely beings. However, the frustrations they experience are most often a product of their very passionate attempts to follow their desires or convictions. Moreover, McCullers employs several devices which work against the sense of loneliness and which lend a tenuous sense of unity, an echoing of sensibility, to the discrete voices of the characters.

The very real ambiguities which structure our perception of the lives of the characters of Lonely Hunter have given rise to vastly differing opinions on the novel's meaning and on Carson McCullers's conclusions concerning human relationships: Oliver Evans, for example, suggests that what "[McCullers] conceives to be the truth about human nature is a melancholy truth: each man is surrounded by a 'zone of loneliness,' serving a life sentence of solitary confinement" (Clark 126). L. D. Rubin.Jr. offers the same view in the form of a complaint: "[One would think] that so rare a talent for observing and understanding and feeling compassion for others would produce something other than the anguished conviction of emptiness and solitude" (Clark 117). At the same time, many readers of Lonely Hunter have expressed a sense of the beauty of the experience of reading the novel, a feeling which the trajectories of the characters, and the events of the story, cannot account for. Early reviewers such as Richard Wright wrote of the novel's "sheen of weird tenderness" (Clark 17), and stated that one puts the novel down "with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth" (Clark 20). Julian Symons offers the view that McCullers's "poetic vision" allows her to transform "our common loneliness into something rich and strange" (Clark 22).

The unifying elements of the novel which constitute this "poetic vision" do not, I would argue, exist at the level of individual characterization, but are deployed in terms of symbolic representation, structure, and narrative voice. They are disseminated, not within the diegesis, but within the narration taken as a whole, and they implicitly provide the reader with an imaginative space in which to conceive of a less compartmentalized existence than the depiction of any of the individual lives can offer.

interview by Jennifer Murray

The following interview (http://erea.revues.org/4102) was carried out by email between June 2013 ... more The following interview (http://erea.revues.org/4102) was carried out by email between June 2013 and March 2014. It was decided upon subsequent to Joan Copjec’s participation in a symposium on Lacanian readings of literature and film in Besançon, University of Franche-Comté (CRIT; EA 3224).

Blog post by Jennifer Murray

Two works of fiction have had a strong and lasting effect on me: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and... more Two works of fiction have had a strong and lasting effect on me: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. While many other books have given me pleasure, intrigued me, provoked my admiration, these two resonated in me in a way that is personal, but at the place where the personal takes you outside yourself and connects you to the world. ...

https://bookscombined.com/2017/02/27/i-cant-believe-im-on-this-road-again/