States of Fantasy

by Jacqueline Rose

In September 1993, Israel and the PLO signed their first peace treaty; in April 1994, South Africa held its first nonracial elections. Jacqueline Rose argues here for the importance of these two arenas of historic conflict to the English literary and cultural imagination and to the new disciplinary boundaries of the humanities today. As in her previous books, her fundamental question is the place of fantasy in public and private identities. But in States of Fantasy she pushes her investigation into what at first glance seem unlikely places. In fact, as she convincingly demonstrates, nowhere demonstrates more clearly than the above regions the need for a psychoanalytically informed understanding of historical process. And nothing makes more visible the unbreakable line that runs between literature and politics than the place of England and its writing in those histories. Her provocative study offers the strongest rebuttal to critics who try to sever the links between the study of
literature and culture and the making and unmaking of the modern world.

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Jacqueline Rose, FBA (born 1949, London) is a British academic who is currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Rose was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris and her doctorate from the University of London.

Her book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

She is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Rose is a regular broadcaster on and contributor to the London Review of Books.

Rose's States of Fantasy was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[GwenViolet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably *the* model in how to conduct humane, psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism.