Surrealist writer André Breton praised hysteria for being the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, but many physicians have since viewed it as the "wastebasket of medicine," a psychosomatic state that defies attempts at definition and cure and that can be easily mistaken for other pathological conditions. In light of a resurgence of critical interest in hysteria, leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Bronfen reinvestigates medical writings and cultural performance to reveal the continued relevance of a disorder widely thought to be a romantic formulation of the past. Through a critical rereading, she develops a new concept of hysteria, one that challenges traditional gender-based theories linking it to dissatisfied feminine sexual desire. Bronfen turns instead to hysteria's traumatic causes, particularly the fear of violation, and shows how the conversion of psychic anguish into somatic symptoms can be interpreted today as the enactment of personal and cultural discontent.Tracing the development of cultural formations of hysteria from the 1800s to the present, this book explores the writings of Freud, Charcot, and Janet together with fictional texts (Radcliffe, Stoker, Anne Sexton), opera (Mozart, Wagner), cinema (Cronenberg, Hitchcock, Woody Allen), and visual art (Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Cindy Sherman). Each of these creative works attests to a particular relationship between hysteria and self-fashioning, and enables us to read hysteria quite literally as a language of discontent. The message broadcasted by the hysteric is one of vulnerability: vulnerability of the symbolic, of identity, and of the human body itself.Throughout this work, Bronfen not only offers fresh approaches to understanding hysteria in our culture, but also introduces a new metaphor to serve as a theoretical tool. Whereas the phallus has long dominated psychoanalytical discourse, the image of the navel--a knotted originary wound common to both genders--facilitates discussion of topics relevant to hysteria, such as trauma, mortality, and infinity. Bronfen's insights make for a lively, innovative work sure to interest readers across the fields of art and literature, feminism, and psychology.Originally published in 1998.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: This volume--the most comprehensive monograph published on Francesca Woodman to date--considers her enigmatic photography in the light of the tradition of the tableau vivant and also explores for the first time her poetic use of props (mirror, gloves, wallpaper, etc...read more

Product Description: In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out...read more

Product Description: Specters of War looks at the way war has been brought to the screen in various genres and at different historical moments throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Hollywood has emerged as a place where national narratives are created and circulated so that audiences can engage with fantasies, ideologies, and anxieties that take hold at a given time, only to change with the political climate...read more

Crossmappings here collects for the first time a selection of distinguished literary and art critic, Elisabeth Bronfen’s highly praised essays on visual culture for a wider public, many of which have never before been available in English.     Among Bronfen’s subjects are Edgar Degas’s portraits of women and the female nude; pop culture and cinema; and hysteria and culture—included throughout are color images that support and illustrate her ideas. She also presents essays on great twentieth century artists, such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and Frida Kahlo, and key figures of contemporary art, including Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul McCarthy. In addition, Crossmappings includes a comparative examination of the photographs of Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, and Nobuyoshi Araki. In a new introductory essay, Bronfen reflects on the deep changes in current visual culture and its significance within our everyday life.      Offering fascinating and unparalleled insight into artists and their work, Crossmappings is a triumph of acute intelligence spanning a wide-range of subjects that will interest scholars of visual culture, and artists and art lovers alike.      “An admirably rigorous study of the intricate ties between artistic representation, femininity, and death, Elisabeth Bronfen's Over Her Dead Body stands as a comprehensive must-read in her field. . . . Her readings are fully engaged, often seductive, always provocative. ”—Pat E. Boyer, University of Tulsa

Product Description: Addresses the question of how identity is formed as a result of corporeal and cultural positioning, by mapping Dorothy Richardson's early modernist text, Pilgrimage, against our postmodern interest in real and imagined geographies.

Product Description: Number Two: Fragile documents the second exhibition of works from the Julia Stoschek Collection, whose theme was corporeality in videos, installations and photography. Artists include Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Nathalie Djurberg, Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist and Rosemarie Trockel...read more

Product Description: There are few enough female artists who have maintained an international reputation across the entire second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but fortunately the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (born 1919) is one of them...read more

Product Description: Sigmund Freud defined trauma as "an experience which, within a short period of time, presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way." The subject represses the traumatic experience, which then begins to enter into consciousness through its only other avenue, the dream--or, quite often, the nightmare...read more

Product Description: Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home―and the power to get there―had been with her all along...read more

Product Description: In this engaging and original study Professor Bronfen examines Sylvia Plath's poetry, her novel, The Bell Jar, her shorter fiction, and her autobigraphical texts in the context of the resilient Plath legend that has grown since her suicide in 1963.

Product Description: Chosen to represent Germany in the 2001 Venice Biennale, Gregor Schneider has, since the 1980s, dedicated himself to building rooms as an expression of his art. The focus of his work has been an ordinary tenement building in Germany, known as "Haus u r," where he has lived while transforming it into a building of great atmospheric density though the process of continuous rebuilding...read more

Product Description: Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women...read more

Product Description: Death is a subject of increasing interest in virtually all academic disciplines, yet there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the representation of death in literary contexts. Death and Representation offers a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary essays, rich in cultural perspectives but sharing a relatively common vocabulary...read more

Product Description: The conjuction of death, art, and femininity is a rich and unexplored stratum of Western culture. Why do dead women fascinate even as they repel? Why is the death of a beautiful woman figure so centrallly located in art and literature? And what does this tell us about the role of women in contemprary Westen society? In Over Her Dead Body, Elisabeth Bronfen attempts to remap the history of Western thought about women's bodies...read more