Tamise Van Pelt is Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University.

"I like the analytic and structural purity of the book and its general conceptual shape and progression: from a criticism of critics, to an explication of the theoretical constructs misconstrued by the critics, to a 'practical' application of the constructs in a fresh and brilliant reading of Plath's diaries and poems. Since Lacan is for me the most important thinker for the humanistic disciplines after World War II, nothing is more significant than work like Van Pelt's that truly does contribute to great clarity about his fundamental concepts and his radically new model of the psyche. Van Pelt's demand for and demonstration of a more rigorous kind of reading of his texts is crucial for the advancement of human self-understanding and the maintenance of the dignity of humanist studies." — Maire Jaanus, coeditor of Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Paris Seminars in English and Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction List of Abbreviations 1. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Symposium 2. The Master in the Mirror 3. The Poe-etics of Register Theory 4. Lacanian Epistemology 5. The Discourse of Desire and the Registers in Hamlet 6. Symptomatic Perfectionism in The Journals of Sylvia Plath 7. Being and Otherness Notes Bibliography Index

Tamise Van Pelt is Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University.

"I like the analytic and structural purity of the book and its general conceptual shape and progression: from a criticism of critics, to an explication of the theoretical constructs misconstrued by the critics, to a 'practical' application of the constructs in a fresh and brilliant reading of Plath's diaries and poems. Since Lacan is for me the most important thinker for the humanistic disciplines after World War II, nothing is more significant than work like Van Pelt's that truly does contribute to great clarity about his fundamental concepts and his radically new model of the psyche. Van Pelt's demand for and demonstration of a more rigorous kind of reading of his texts is crucial for the advancement of human self-understanding and the maintenance of the dignity of humanist studies." — Maire Jaanus, coeditor of Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Paris Seminars in English and Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction List of Abbreviations 1. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Symposium 2. The Master in the Mirror 3. The Poe-etics of Register Theory 4. Lacanian Epistemology 5. The Discourse of Desire and the Registers in Hamlet 6. Symptomatic Perfectionism in The Journals of Sylvia Plath 7. Being and Otherness Notes Bibliography Index