Lacan's late teaching is marked by a transition from linguistics to topology as a conceptual grid for the thinking of the psyche. Since the Saussurean-Jakobsonian dimension of Lacan's teaching accounted both for his own frequent turns to the literary (e.g. in the seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter") and for the initial interest his teaching aroused in the English-speaking world, it might seem that this transition widens the schism between the already heterogeneous fields of psychoanalysis and literature. However, Lacan's turn to topology is accompanied by his most sustained treatment of literary texts and the question of literature itself, in relation to the art of James Joyce (in "Lituraterre" {Seminar 18] and the 23rd seminar on the sinthome). What is the relevance of psychoanalytical topology to the study of literature? How can Lacan's directives about topology be developed to bear on macrostructural (e.g. narrative) and macrostructural (e.g. style and rhetoric) dimensions of the literary text? In this seminar, we will explore the consequences of Lacan's topological thinking, especially in the Joyce seminar, for the study of literary texts and the reflection on the category of the literary itself. We will explore these and other questions by articulating Lacan's texts together with the literary texts of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and others,.

Requirements: five analytical responses to theoretical material; referat or seminar paper.