Cultures of the Death Drive is a comprehensive guide to the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and to developments in Kleinian theory to date. It is also an analysis and a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein's thought for understanding modernist literature and visual art. Esther Sanchez-Pardo examines the issues that the seminal discourses of psychoanalysis and artistic modernism brought to the fore in the early twentieth century and points toward the uses of Kleinian thinking for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations today.

Sanchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by "cultures of the death drive" and the related specters of object loss-loss of coherent and autonomous selves, of social orders where stability reigned, of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses. Sanchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts, particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She offers a number of readings-of works by Virginia Woolf, Rene Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen-that reveal the problems melancholia posed for verbal and visual communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her afterword, Sanchez-Pardo explicates the connections between modernist and contemporary melancholia.

A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature and the visual arts, Cultures of the Death Drive is a necessary resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.

A study of melancholia, sexuality, and representation in literary and visual texts that can be read at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and the arts in modernism

About the Author

Esther Sanchez-Pardo is Associate Professor of English at Complutense University in Madrid. She has written and edited numerous books in Spanish.

Reviews
"Cultures of the Death Drive offers a sustained consideration of Kleinian psychoanalysis for literary reading. It will doubtless open up psychoanalytic literary criticism to new and unsettling perspectives. I expect this book to have a singular and important effect on contemporary intellectual life."-Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
"Cultures of the Death Drive is a work of great learning and original thought. I believe it will be an important source book on Klein for beginners and adepts alike."-Fredric R. Jameson, Duke University



Book Information
ISBN 9780822330455
Author Esther Sanchez-Pardo
Format Paperback
Page Count 504
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 658g