Max Cavitch | University of Pennsylvania (original) (raw)
Papers by Max Cavitch
Victorian Studies, Sep 1, 2021
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on on... more Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.
American Literary History, Jun 16, 2023
The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as m... more The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as much to do with its form as with its content—an innovative autobiographical form that Twain crafted not only out of personal upheavals but also with acute insight into the depth psychology of his time.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Apr 3, 2022
The following correspondence, incomplete and edited for length, was conducted between 2005 and 20... more The following correspondence, incomplete and edited for length, was conducted between 2005 and 2017—12 years out of the 15-year-long span of my almost entirely epistolary friendship with Philip Bromberg. With all the casualness and inadvertency of an email exchange, it nevertheless speaks—for us both—far more eloquently than anything I could write about the history of our friendship and about the various ways in which we shared our love of language with each other, across various distances and disciplinary boundaries.
History of the Present
Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most compreh... more Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most comprehensive and sophisticated basis for the exploration of human consciousness, the field of psychoanalysis, from its inception to the present, has continued to offer unprecedented insights into how we perceive, record, and share the complexities of temporality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate, with the help of various works by Walter Benjamin—works in which his attunement with psychoanalytic concepts is of special interest—that all historical writing must yield, in one way or another, to the post-Freudian description of the unconscious and its role in elaborating historians’ interest in the historical as such.
Modern Language Quarterly, 2022
This essay historicizes the emergence of the term autotheory as the signifier of a mode of autobi... more This essay historicizes the emergence of the term autotheory as the signifier of a mode of autobiographical writing and reading based primarily on intersubjective histories and relational ontologies. Instead of trying to define autotheory as a neatly circumscribed “subgenre” of autobiography, it argues that the term stands for a contemporary disturbance in the entire autobiographical field—a disturbance that, thanks in large part to the queer and feminist genealogies that inform it, helps disrupt the close association of autobiography and the prizing of ontological certainty and reorients the autobiographical pursuit of (self-)recognition away from the scripts of neoliberal individualism and toward the self’s more radical and formative intersubjectivity.
Oxford Literary Review, 2021
This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-M... more This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical.
American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, 2012
PMLA, 2016
“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d&#... more “Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).
American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, 2012
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2016
Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the cli... more Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the clinical literature an ill-prepared and even aversive reception. Suicidality among such children draws especially sharp attention to the need for better alternatives to current treatment modalities-the focus here is chiefly on the relational area, with its emphasis on the coupling norm and attachment theory-and, more broadly, for the further comprehensive development of queer-and LGBT-affirmative psychoanalytic theory and practice. In advocating for at-risk queer children, I also argue that the queer child is a meaningful transferential figure for the improved lifechances of psychoanalysis itself and for the enhanced role of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the realm of social transformation.
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2013
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010
Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2012
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 2009
Victorian Studies, Sep 1, 2021
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on on... more Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.
American Literary History, Jun 16, 2023
The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as m... more The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as much to do with its form as with its content—an innovative autobiographical form that Twain crafted not only out of personal upheavals but also with acute insight into the depth psychology of his time.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Apr 3, 2022
The following correspondence, incomplete and edited for length, was conducted between 2005 and 20... more The following correspondence, incomplete and edited for length, was conducted between 2005 and 2017—12 years out of the 15-year-long span of my almost entirely epistolary friendship with Philip Bromberg. With all the casualness and inadvertency of an email exchange, it nevertheless speaks—for us both—far more eloquently than anything I could write about the history of our friendship and about the various ways in which we shared our love of language with each other, across various distances and disciplinary boundaries.
History of the Present
Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most compreh... more Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most comprehensive and sophisticated basis for the exploration of human consciousness, the field of psychoanalysis, from its inception to the present, has continued to offer unprecedented insights into how we perceive, record, and share the complexities of temporality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate, with the help of various works by Walter Benjamin—works in which his attunement with psychoanalytic concepts is of special interest—that all historical writing must yield, in one way or another, to the post-Freudian description of the unconscious and its role in elaborating historians’ interest in the historical as such.
Modern Language Quarterly, 2022
This essay historicizes the emergence of the term autotheory as the signifier of a mode of autobi... more This essay historicizes the emergence of the term autotheory as the signifier of a mode of autobiographical writing and reading based primarily on intersubjective histories and relational ontologies. Instead of trying to define autotheory as a neatly circumscribed “subgenre” of autobiography, it argues that the term stands for a contemporary disturbance in the entire autobiographical field—a disturbance that, thanks in large part to the queer and feminist genealogies that inform it, helps disrupt the close association of autobiography and the prizing of ontological certainty and reorients the autobiographical pursuit of (self-)recognition away from the scripts of neoliberal individualism and toward the self’s more radical and formative intersubjectivity.
Oxford Literary Review, 2021
This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-M... more This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical.
American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, 2012
PMLA, 2016
“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d&#... more “Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).
American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, 2012
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2016
Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the cli... more Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the clinical literature an ill-prepared and even aversive reception. Suicidality among such children draws especially sharp attention to the need for better alternatives to current treatment modalities-the focus here is chiefly on the relational area, with its emphasis on the coupling norm and attachment theory-and, more broadly, for the further comprehensive development of queer-and LGBT-affirmative psychoanalytic theory and practice. In advocating for at-risk queer children, I also argue that the queer child is a meaningful transferential figure for the improved lifechances of psychoanalysis itself and for the enhanced role of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the realm of social transformation.
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2013
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010
Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2012
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 2009