About the Book
Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief.
Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."
Table of Contents:
Aron, Harris, Introduction. Part I: Therapeutic Action.Ehrenberg, The Intimate Edge of Therapeutic Relatedness. Slochower, Holding: Something Old and Something New. Cooper, Levit, Old and New Objects in Fairbairnian and American Relational Theory. Slavin, Kriegman, Why the Analyst Needs to Change: Toward a Theory of Conflict, Negotiation, and Mutual Imfluence in the Therapeutic Process. Maroda, Show Some Emotion: Completing the Cycle of Affective Communication. Berman, Psychoanalytic Supervision: The Intersubjective Development. Jacobs, On Misreading and Misleading Patients: Some Reflections on Communications, Miscommunications, and Countertransference Enactments. Part II: Relational Perspectives on Development.Beebe, Lachmann, Representation and Internalization in Infancy: Three Principles of Salience. Fonagy, Target, Mentalization and the Changing Aims of Child Psychoanalysis. Coates, Having a Mind of One's Own and Holding the Other in Mind: Commentary on Paper by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. Lyons-Ruth, The Two-Person Unconscious: Intersubjective Dialogue, Enactive Relational Representation, and the Emergence of New Forms of Relational Organization. Part III: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Relationality.Altman, Psychoanalysis and the Urban Poor. Dimen, Perversion Is Us: Eight Notes. Leary, Race, Self-Disclosure, and "Forbidden Talk": Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Practice. Corbett, More Life: Centrality and Marginality in Human Development.
About the Author :
Lewis Aron, Ph.D., ABPP, is Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; President, Division of Psychologists-Psychoanalysts of the New York State Psychological Association (NYSPA); Editorial Board, Studies in Gender and Sexuality; and Series Co-editor, Relational Psychoanalysis Book Series.
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Clinical Associate Professor, New York University Postdoc-toral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is the author of Gender as Soft Assembly (TAP, 2005).
Review :
"Death is universal and inevitable, which is precisely why James (Deakin Univ, Melbourne, Australia) believes its frequent appearance in adolescent literature, to date little studied, is a topic worthy of analysis...James makes a good case for the application of her ideas to other Anglophone literature, and without doubt she breaks new ground in the study of a topic widely represented in fiction for teens, yet not widely studied...Recommended." -- Choice, June 2009 'Uncompromising in its refusal to sentimentalise either adolescent experience or its representation, Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature forces its readers to confront what is at stake in the ideologies underlying fiction for young adults.' - Shelley King, Times Higher Education Supplement
