Title: Soundscapes of subjectivity, desire and violence : a Lacanian reading of Jennifer Egan's Black Box
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2023, vol. 49, iss. 1, pp. 147-162
Extent
147-162
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2023-1-8
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.78903
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Rights access
open access
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The article investigates the roles of and relations between violence and desire in Jennifer Egan's flash fiction "Black Box" (2012), with special attention to aspects of voice/sound, as theorized in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Read as an allegory of the processes within our psychological development, "Black Box" thematizes the problem of attaining subjectivity in its social context. The protagonist transitions from the pre-verbal narcissistic domain of the Imaginary, in which the subject-to-be emerges as both unified and alienated, to the predefined realm of the Symbolic, – a realm of culture, law and language. A strong analogy between the Lacanian theory of voice and the treatment of voice and sound in the story is exemplified in different narrative elements – characterization of the protagonists, narrative voices, and theme. Finally, the analysis shows that violence is inherent in both Self and the Other, as an essential attribute of identity formation.
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[7] Gallop, Jane (1985) Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornel University Press.
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[13] Lagaay, Alice (2008) Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the History of Psychoanalysis. Freie Universität Berlin, E-pisteme 1 (1), 53–62.
[14] Mieszkowski, Sylvia (2014) Resonant Alterities: Sound, Desire and Anxiety in Non-Realist Fiction. Bielefeld: Transcript.
[15] Newman, A. Daniel (2018) Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O'Brian and Jenniffer Egan. Frontiers of narrative studies 4 (1), 42–65.
[16] Nie, Bao-yu (2015) Exploring image culture through narrative: A study on Jennifer Egan's Twitter fiction "Black Box". Journal of Literature and Art Studies 5 (10), 820–829.
[17] Patea, Viorica (2012) The short story: An overview of the history and evolution of the genre. In: Patea, Viorica (ed.) Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective. New York & Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–26.
[18] Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld (eds.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Sound studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[19] Pisarski, Mariusz (2017) Digital postmodernism: From hypertexts to twitterature and bots. World Literature Studies 3 (9), 41–53.
[20] Precup, Amelia (2016) The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan's "Black Box". American, British and Canadian Studies, The Journal of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu 25 (1), 171–186.
[21] Selden, Raman; Widdowson, Peter and Brooker, Peter (2005) A reader's guide to contemporary literary theory. Oxford: Pearson Longman.
[22] Shapard, Robert and James Thomas (eds.) (1986) American Short-short Stories, Utah: Gibbs Smith.
[23] Sheikh, F. Ahmad (2017) Subjectivity, desire and theory: Reading Lacan. Cogent Arts and Humanities 4, 1–12.
[24] Žižek, Slavoj (2008) Violence. New York: Picador.