Inwardness and Existence

Walter A. (Mac) Davis is professor emeritus of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11.

“Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it.” —Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan"If the book we are reading does not wake us up, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?" —Kafka, from the epigraph“Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency, content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical contingency and processsual immediacy) into dynamic, rupturing explorations of categories which provoke the reader’s analytic process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with stress, the heady rush of analysis, and the challenges of hard work.” —Leighton Brooks McCutcheon, Journal of Mind and Behavior“Praiseworthy because it grapples with the fundamental assumptions of these competing traditions, and does so with clarity and conviction.” —David M. Thompson, Philosophy and Literature